九乡新闻网警察故事1粤语版在哪看:Gains and Losses - NYTimes.com
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Editorial | The Rural Life
Gains and Losses
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: April 3, 2011
After a long, scentless winter, apart from the tang of woodsmoke in theair, you could suddenly smell the earth again early one morning lastweek. It seems odd to call the scent fresh — it was darker and mustierthan that — but fresh is how it felt, hovering like a ground fog abovethe last banks of snow. A whole field of clover could grow in that smellalone.
When the snow slid back at last, the grass looked as if it were wakingfrom a long, sodden nap, and all but the stoutest plants, even theyuccas, had been bulldozed. Vole trails are still visible on what lookslike a lawn of crushed velvet, and the ground isn’t quite soft underfootyet, except where the gophers have been digging, and there it is spongyand accepting. The only ice left is under the scattered hay where thehorses fed in the middle pasture. Every time I walk across it I think of19th-century icehouses packed with the winter’s pond ice and insulatedwith sawdust and straw.
This was a winter with casualties. The snow undid the bottom row ofinsulators on the electric fence, one by one. I’ve lost track of themice that wandered into my traps. Two losses above all leave medisheartened. One is the beehive. There was nothing stirring there on a60-degree day a couple of weeks ago, no bees on the aconites orsnowdrops. There will be a mournful spring harvest of honey as I cleanout the hive and prepare it for a new colony next spring
What worries me most is the barn cat, whom I haven’t seen since theharshest days of early February. He had been coming up to the house toeat on the deck, but I usually saw him up in the hayloft, watchingwarily as I tossed down bales, or basking in a wedge of sunlight in therun-in shed. In the heaviest snow, he waited on a low dogwood branchuntil he saw me coming, and then hid until I set out his food. I believehe’s gone. But there’s just a chance that one warm day I’ll see himsitting — black and tailless — on a fence rail, looking at me as if toask where I’ve been.