Sunday sundries

You would think the signs of spring here on Berry Road would be the usual: snow patches melting away, the brown and dry red oak leaves finally falling as new leaves push the old ones off, the forsythia starting to show hints of yellow, more kinds of birdsong in the back yard.

But two sure signs of spring to me are feline-related: 1) The cats stop using the litter boxes since they can now do their business outside; and 2) I found a mouse head in the middle of the carpet this morning. They often leave just the head or maybe a paw. Sometimes the whole mouse corpus delicti is there. Unfortunately, the mouse color is close to that of the carpet. As a result, I get to stop checking the litter boxes every morning but now must scan the floor for mouse bits and check the mouse sticky traps as well. There is usually a flurry of mouse trapping for a couple of weeks, and then the traps part settles down to nothing.

Of course, once it warms up a bit more, the cats will also bring in garden snakes and Tom will run out of the house until something is done about that. Ah, yes, it reminds me of the Sgt. Barry Sadler song from 1965: Ballad of the Green Berets:

Fighting soldiers from the sky,
Fearless men who jump and die,
Men who mean just what they say,
The brave men of the Green Beret.

Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America's best.
One hundred men will test today
But only three win the Green Beret.

That's Tom. His silver wings patch hangs above the desk in his office, framed along with a patch from the Canadian forces whose jump school he passed and for whom he was a liaison. We were looking through some of his pictures from Vietnam, and the one he is proudest of is of him and Martha Rae, who was a colonel in the Army Reserve. The picture was taken at a party they had in her honor when she visited the troops.

Come to think of it, maybe Tom's Vietnam experience is what made him careful of snakes. I remember hearing that when the guys went over there, they were told that Vietnam had 100 species of snakes and 99 of them were poisonous. The other one just swallowed you whole.

Other signs of spring: Tom planted some more day lilies out front and put up a couple of posts alongside the deck where he is planning to hang the old family farm bell at some point. I did some spring housecleaning, including flipping the mattress on my bed, airing out the pillows and washing the blankets and comforters and putting away the electric blanket. This confused the cats tremendously since my bed has been their daybed lately.

When I went shopping, they had fresh strawberries on sale, so I decided to make the old sponge cake with frozen strawberries and whipped cream cake. I didn't get my layers lined up perfectly, so it looked a bit lopsided. Otherwise it turned out fine and we both enjoyed it.