Date: 04/04/2007

Number: 1

I saw my first monarch of the year last Wednesday, April 4th, in Burnsville, NC, and my friend Judy's husband Bill saw one on or about the same day near where they live.

However, we have had 20 degree temps the last two nights (another predicted for tonight, April 8th). We woke yesterday to 2-3 inches of SNOW. I am sure that returning monarch--the earliest I have ever seen here--died in the cold. SO depressing!

Our spring, which was proceeding so beautifully, has been ruined. Trees that had begun to leaf out all got burned, cherry in full bloom now has brown blossoms. Judy and Bill lost their whole apple crop in their 80-acre orchard.

I can't get that image of that poor doomed monarch, flying into the teeth of a wind, pushing onward, the day before the temperature dropped. My heart leaped with joy at seeing my first monarch—and then plummeted, because I knew what it did not: that it needed to be hundreds and hundreds of miles farther south to survive the next few days, and there it was, flying NE! I suppose it's inspiring to see something pushing onward like that, fulfilling its destiny, but it made my heart hurt. All I could think of was that it had made it all the way to Mexico, and through the whole winter, and all the way back here, weeks ahead of the first emergent milkweed—and what was to become of it.

All our apple growers have lost their crops. There will be no peaches or strawberries—at least not from anywhere close to here. The cold put the lights out on our mountainsides, where the tulip poplars were just beginning to incandesce. The daylilies and hostas, which had leafed out, are flattened. I feel for the bees, who have lost all the flowering trees (and we know what a hard time bees are having these days).

I wonder what the result will be of the loss of the spicebush. The spicebush swallowtails had begun to emerge. Now they have no leaves on which to lay their eggs. And what about the birds next fall that normally eat the high lipid spicebush fruits on their southward journey?

Losses like this leave far greater imprints on the world than we suspect, or remember for very long.

Burnsville, NC

Latitude: 35.9 Longitude: -82.3

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