First Green

The snow melted back. And then we had a blizzard. And it melted back again and then we had a blizzard.

Now it's almost gone. It's supposed to hit 70 f tomorrow. We go straight from winter to the middle of summer.. oh well.

My house lot has several large red pines. (After so many years living around them I can tell reds from whites by sight-- the bark of the red pines is, well, red. But if it's a small tree and hard to identify, count the needles. Reds have three needles per bunch, three for r-e-d, while whites have five.)

We also have four white spruces. They were growing in front of my mom's cottage, up in the Upper Peninsula, and they were in the one cleared space between the house and the lake, so they were going to block the view. Mom and my stepdad, Don, who died a few weeks ago, were planning to chop them down-- it would have been more like "clip" than "chop" at that point, actually-- but I had this blank spot in my yard where I could use a windbreak and a privacy screen. And I wanted to save the little things. So we dug up the four white spruces and a tiny cedar tree. I put them all in the trunk of my car, brought them down here, and planted them.

The deer ate the cedar, but the spruces took- even the mangled, scraggly one that had lost its top. I didn't think they could regrow their tops once they lost them, but it did. It's a healthy and shapely tree now, as are they all. And tall, so tall now! When did that happen?

They say that pines and spruces are evergreens, but they aren't, really. In the middle of winter they are almost as gray as everything else. But with the spring their colors brighten again.

That is the first sign of hope for the new summer, the first green of spring, then. The pine needles are green in the sunlight. The woods are beginning to come back to life-- and so am I.

Dad's Radio

I collect radios. I spend a lot of time "listening to static," as Teph so charmingly puts it.

A few weeks ago I came across a Panasonic set. A nice transistor radio with good sound, it is nevertheless far less capable than any of the more modern digital sets I already have. Three bands, AM, FM, and shortwave. A dial with a needle, no clock (thank goodness!) and no digital frequency display or digital anything.

It is newly made, but so 1966. It even comes in a cut-away case, made so you can operate the radio while it stays inside its case, the way all transistor radios did back then.

Well, I think I may have found why I had to have this thing. It's so like a radio my father had, that fascinated me as a kid. Here, take a look at them:

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/channel_6519.html

http://cgi.ebay.com/PANASONIC-RF-562D-AM-FM-SW-Shortwave-Transistor-Radio-/140524431938#ht_2663wt_901

They're not at all the same, but there's more than a little resemblance.

The funny thing was, my dad never seemed to use this radio, or like it much.

It was a present from "his" employees when he left one school district to take over another. They picked it out for him because it receives aircraft band signals, and he had a pilot's license. It's the thought that counts, of course, but what it amounted to was a bulky radio that specialized in picking up one band that only had morse code beacons on it, and another that wouldn't pick up anything much unless you lived right next door to the control tower of a major airport.

Still, I was fascinated with this set, because it told me for the first time that there were radio signals out there other than plain old medium wave broadcast radio.

So I suppose that Channel Master portable was where all my listening to static started. And I suppose its resemblance to that old radio, that I had forgotten until I stumbled upon it online, is why I had to buy the Panasonic. The mind is a murky place, sometimes.