LAUREL COUNTY, Ky. — Last weekend, I forget which night, I was sitting on the front porch sipping a cup of sleepy time tea and soaking up the midnight air when it occurred to me that something seemed different from this night and the one before.  

I don’t have much to do these days other than sit around and worry about stuff like that so I decided to sit there and see how many lightning bugs I could count hovering over the newly mowed lawn, and that’s when I realized the difference. Lightning bugs — in April?  Hundreds and hundreds of lightning bugs as far as I could see into the tree line and out across the back forty.

I don’t keep things like this written down but isn’t April awfully early to be seeing lightning bugs?

I usually associate them with late May or early June.

I have already been chewed out by several friends when I called last week’s cold snap blackberry winter.  Blackberry winter, I am advised, does not occur until the middle of May.  And  I said, “oh yeah, then tell me why my blackberries are blooming. That’s not supposed to happen until mid-May either, but they are already white as snow.”

Now I am told by the same sages that my blackberries are doomed, not that I mind that all that much because they are thorny and hard to pick.  My pal, Ralph King, has a huge patch of the thorn-less varieties.  Ralph’s vines also produce berries bigger than my thumbs and it only takes a few minutes to pick a gallon.

The ones out here by me are about one third the size of Ralph’s and it takes over an hour to pick a gallon.  Another hour of first aid is required before you can mash them up for jam or cobbler mix and even then you wonder how much of the mixture is blackberry juice and how much is blood.  So I’m sitting here worrying about whether Ralph’s patch has already blossomed and if, in fact, we still have another blast of winter to endure before the ultimate arrival of spring.

I do know, for sure, that one of these damned little winters (Redbud, Dogwood or Locust, depending on which sage you talk to) has already wiped out my pears and peaches. Last year, we harvested well over five bushels of pears and I was still eating on them in January.  This year, the tree bloomed in February and the baby pears got bigger than marbles before the middle of April when the big freeze happened.

This year, come October, we will not have a single pear, peach or apple, but Loretta and I will be able, I do so hope,  to walk through the little orchard and reminisce about last fall.  

In the meantime, if, in fact, we still have blackberry winter yet to come, I am somewhat anxious about the survival of the beautiful lightning bugs.  I am hoping that they know more about the weather than the pessimists who insist that we still have one more freeze to go.      

 

ikeadams@aol.com