04.27.16  The rising water has reached the end of our dock, which means in five more feet, we’ll be at full pool.  We can probably put the little motorboat into the water in three more feet.  Not that we’d want to with mornings at 40 degrees and evenings at 50ish, but a totally calm evening with bright sunshine and 65 degrees is on its way.  Expectations are rising.

We’ve received well over two inches of rain with this low pressure system and mushrooms have sprouted in the lawn.  The lilacs are blooming in town–earliest date on record.  The hummingbirds have returned, and are competing for attention with Mr. Robin, who’s made three new nests on the front porch.  Don has decided that he’s built just the right number for his wife, when she returns.  She gets to say, “no, this one’s too soft;  this one’s too hard; this one’s just right.”  For the moment, the kitties appear to be content in serious study of little bugs on the ground, ignoring the excitement over their heads.  It’s now too light to see stars before bedtime, or at 6 a.m. when I’m out of bed, but the waning gibbous moon was visible from the dock this morning.

I’m going to miss the stars in the months ahead as we move into the land of the midnight sun, but it’s great fun to watch for the moonrise and moon set.  We’ve never been able to calculate where it will be in the sky, despite all of our experiments at the dining room table with friends, where we take a couple of balls and try to demonstrate the rotation of the moon wobbling around the tilting earth.  But, making our best guess, there’s nothing like getting in the little boat, just before bedtime, out on mirror-silver water, and motoring out in the dimming gold twilight, until we see the moon rising over mountains behind our house in the East.  Then, we turn the motor off and bob around in the stillness of it all.  Yes, expectations are rising around here.