FEBRUARY PREPARES FOR THE SHIFT TO HIGH GEAR

So it is Woodchuck Day again. Huh? You still want to call it Groundhog Day? Well, all right. But I think Woodchuck Day sounds much more classy. And, of course, it's the same animal. Calling it groundhog would lead one to believe it belonged to the swine family and it doesn't. It is a member of the squirrel family. Surprised?

Charles and Elizabeth Schwartz, authorities on wild mammals of Missouri say that the name woodchuck is an English corruption of the Indian name for the animal. Wish I knew an Indian who could give me his native pronunciation of it. I'd like to hear how near we come to the original.

The woodchuck doesn't really chuck wood unless, in making his burrow in the ground, he comes across a root which he cuts with his teeth and has to scrape some of the chips backward which he does with his hind feet. That isn't chucking.

The Schwartzes say the name groundhog is obvious from the animal's squat appearance and habit of living in the ground. I have difficulty with this. Hogs don't live in the ground and they aren't necessarily squat unless we are thinking of the little black expensive Vietnamese pig whose belly touches the ground.

We don't do much to celebrate Groundhog/Woodchuck Day except to notice if the dawn is clear or cloudy. You know the rest of the superstition. We don't even have traditional foods for the day. If I had to come up with one, its main ingredient would be something earthy such as rutabagas, turnips, potatoes, parsnips. A person could boil some rutabagas and throw in some hog. Huh? Oh, you want me to call it pork.

February is an earthy month. Lots of earth is tracked into the house to be scraped off, you hope, on some square of old carpet which soon gives off an odor of plowed fields, which isn't bad, but maybe not for the house. You go out to empty the coffee grounds on the garden spot and you come back into the house with a little earth on you shoe soles. You stoop down to scratch the ground a little to see if that is actually a crocus coming through and you come back into the house with a little earth under your fingernails. You throw out the spent, potted poinsettias being careful to shake all the good potting soil off the roots and you come back into the house with a little earth, maybe, in your hair. But who disdains the good earth? It seems to metamorphose to dirt when it gets out of place.

I walked over to the big sycamore a few days ago, specifically to see if I might come across a hummock of fresh earth where Chuckie might have stuck his nose through, even before February second. Didn't see such. I did see a dandelion in crumpled bloom. I ground my foot on some fallen sycamore balls just to see the frisky little wind pick up the brown fuzz and carry it away. Things thus moving through the air are always graceful thistledown, milkweed floss, apple blossoms, leaves. The buds are big on the sycamore limbs. They are leaves-to-be, packed like parachutes. I picked one off to bring back home. split open and put under the magnifying glass to see if I could tell how the big leaf to be was folded. Round and round or accordion like? I need more than a magnifying glass to tell, a compound microscope maybe.

This sycamore is my adopted tree. Since it is self pruning, in the wintertime there are little limbs and twigs at its feet. I, as usual, pick them up and put them in a little pile. It is exercise for winter stiffened knees and gives me a sense of making things neat for an old friend, like sweeping its floor. It has offered shade to me on my summer walks, not dense, stuffy shade but light and airy and musical. The slightest breeze in summer, riffling through the big leaves, causes the tree to generate a breeze of its own. Music too, if your ears are so attuned.

There is not one leaf on the tree now so that summer song has given way to the harsh call of a crow or a blue jay that is startled by something as one was the day of my visit. I tried to see what jay was alarmed about but didn't discern anything. Maybe, sitting there on a limb, he felt a tremor, emanating from the roots of the tree. Could it be the sap a'stirrin', getting ready for its upward journey? Or could it be old Chuck waking up down there in his cozy wintertime nest amongst the roots?

REJOICE!