Riders on the Storm

We missed seeing the sun at dead center on First Street yesterday because storm clouds were gathering all morning and half the afternoon, with rain falling in earnest by two-ish on the Spring Equinox.

Does it seem wrong to have thunder and lightning, hail and rain on the First Day of Spring?  If so, think of the equinox as the middle of spring as it is and it won't seem ruinous at all.  The middle is squishy, flows from one end to the other, not as importune as the First or Last.

Various scenes from a blustery, wet and cold equinox include a propeller spinning in a gust,


a lavatera bud, the dried holiday wreath,

wisteria in full bloom, a monarch caterpillar on a twitching stem,

smoke from a cozy fire,

osteospermum blossoms glowing, a garden snail on Juan's aeonium,

a mourning cloak pupa hanging in the euryops, and last but not least an opossum mom and her five babies.


 
 The opossum (Didelphis virginiana) surprised me as I was surveying the property this morning after the hail and wind.  There she was in broad daylight staring at me.  I went to grab my camera, and as I reappeared from behind the privet hedge she seemed appalled, in a slow opossum-like way, that I had come back.  She slowly turned away from my unwanted attentions and scuttled behind the fence with her babies clinging to her back.

Opossums eat snails and slugs and all sorts of other things, some of which I don't necessarily want around, so I'd say this family is a good addition to the garden fauna.

We also missed viewing the supermoon as it was obscured by cloud cover Saturday evening. A nice man on a video on the internets had advised us "the supermoon is not to be feared, it should be observed, either alone or with someone, maybe a romantic interest or just the person you will spend the night with."  Oddly personal advice coming from an astronomer.  So, yeah, sadly the moon was not in view on the eve of the equinox.