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By BILL THOMPSON
Nature sometimes has a way of confusing itself. It is usually the weather that is the catalyst for confusion, the conduit for incongruity.
The last couple of months are good examples. This is wintertime, you know. Maybe it’s not the dead of winter but we should at least be easing into a comatose state. It’s a time when earth’s creatures are supposed to take a break. Bears hibernate. Squirrels eat all those nuts they accumulated. Birds fly south. Flowers shed their blooms and trees shed their leaves.
The warm weather can certainly be classified as unseasonable. I have seen several things lately that lead me to believe that you may not be able to fool Mother Nature but you can mislead her.
One Wednesday morning I saw a robin, a harbinger of spring, pecking at stray grains of birdseed that had fallen under the bird feeder on my back porch. The sun was shining in a blue sky.
During the night, the temperature fell to below freezing. In the morning, I saw the poor robin perched on the edge of the concrete birdbath pecking at the frozen water.
All around my house are several pecan trees. As recently as Christmas Day, I saw squirrels scurrying up those trees bearing pecans in their mouths, leaving the nuts in the hollowed out portions of the trees, then, anticipating a long, cold winter- scampering back down for more food. Maybe I was just imagining things, but during that recent really warm spell, I declare I saw those squirrels throwing pecans out of their hiding place back onto the ground.
One of the dogwood trees along my driveway had a flower on it the week after Christmas.
Hurricanes were still brewing well after the end of November. (It occurred to me that since we had run through the alphabet in naming this year’s storms and since storms always came from the south, we could give the remaining storms Southern double names like, Annie Lee, Betty Lou, Carrie Mae, etc.).
On New Year’s Eve I saw a girl go into Pierce and Company in Hallsboro looking for sun tan lotion. Not only did they have it in stock, they sold it to her at the regular summer price.
In the opposite extreme, I saw a really curiously attired fellow walking across the parking lot at the mall in Wilmington.
He had on one of those parkas with all the fur around the hood and the hood was pulled up over his head so that all you could see was his face. The rest of his attire consisted of only a pair of shorts and flip-flops. Where did he think he was? Was he so confused that he was just making an attempt to cover all the bases?
That should have told me that humans, like the other animals, can be misled by the weather.
Indeed, the clincher came when I saw a car with Pennsylvania license plates stop for gas at a local station. When the driver got out, I saw that he was wearing the traditional winter ensemble of many of our Northern visitors: a Hawaiian print shirt, Bermuda shorts, black over-the-calf socks, and sandals.When he had finished filling his car with gasoline he took off…headed north.