Good news! The skunk is dead! For some reason, a sick skunk took a shine to neighbor Joyce, or at least the area around her house. I saw it twice when she texted me that she could see it in the pasture. Although it should be a nocturnal animal, we saw it shuffle between her shed and ours in the middle of the day. One night the stench was so great that Joyce couldn’t sleep, even with a blanket over her head. The skunk finally died on Joyce’s driveway, luckily without spraying anyone on the street. Neighbor Bob looked at it, waited some hours to make sure it hadn’t moved, and took care of the carcass. He told us this morning that despite his waiting, the skunk’s body was not totally stiff. Needless to say, our neighborhood smells a lot better now. Thank you, Bob!

On David’s day off, we went up on the Blue Ridge Parkway for the first time this year. Driving there is like a mini-vacation for me. The road is high up on mountains when it isn’t actually on a ridge. There are sweeping views of ridges to the horizon, often filled with that blue haze for which our mountains are famous. There wasn’t much color at higher elevations, but we saw tons of icicles hanging from boulders beside the road. The breezes coming up the slopes were sweet, with not a hint of skunk odor. I asked David to pose with the Woodfin Cascades behind him. We could hear the roar of the water, even at that great distance. He added an appropriate splash of blue to the pre-Spring landscape.