A Law in Clover Time

Wine drinking at midnight on the pier, yes. Being gifted with oysters for walking out on the shell bar, sure. Spending entire summer afternoons eating crabs on the big porch, yup.

But waking up to several inches of snow on the ground with fat flakes still coming down? At my parents' house on the northern neck, never. Ever.

As in, not once in all the years I've been visiting them have I awakened to the sight of the gardens, the marsh, the pier - everything in sight except the Rappahannock river - blanketed.

Standing in the breakfast room looking out at it, my attention was caught by a portly groundhog making tracks across the yard toward the garage, no doubt looking for someplace dry.

Every bit as surprising was the small boat out there on the water as the snow continued to come down hard.

Grabbing a pair of binoculars (my father keeps a pair on all three floors of the house for ease of scoping out whatever), I zoomed in, trying to determine what the two men clad in Gorton's fisherman-like waders, one in orange, the other in classic yellow, were doing out there in all this.

Near as I could tell, these two watermen were tonging for oysters in the snow.

Me, I had loaves of soda bread and a coconut cake to make so after breakfast, I got busy on all that.

My mother put her favorite radio station on and before long, I heard the lyric, "There ought to be a moonlight saving time," totally unfamiliar to me but such a lovely, evocative turn of phrase.

There ought to be a law in clover time

to keep that moon out overtime

There absolutely ought to be.

To my mother's amazement, once I finished all my baking, I piled on layers and started out for a walk, turning in a different direction than yesterday.

I headed down the creek toward what used to be the old crab processing plant but which has since been turned into high end waterfront condos, passing pier after pier covered in a layer of snow, like a series of white diving boards perched over the water.

As I approached the condos, I spotted a low-slung brown dog crouched on the lawn of one, his owner tethered to him with a retractable leash and standing on the front porch out of the snow.

Close up, I saw he was a basset hound with ears drooping into the snow and looking as soft as brown velvet.

Asking if I could pet her dog, she reluctantly came down off the porch so sad-eyed Dax the hound could greet me. 

I told her my beagle had loved the snow and she said Dax was just as fond of it. She, however, did not seem to be.

Taking off a glove so I could feel those ears, I made a fast friend of Dax while his owner smoked and told me she and her boyfriend had come down from Fredericksburg to visit his parents but once they heard F-burg had gotten 11 inches of snow, decided to extend their visit.

After I said goodbye, I wandered back down past the tiny post office and the waterfront museum, to the very end of the other side of the point before having my fill of walking in the pouring snow.

After my final good daughter deed shoveling the walk, I cleaned off the car and started back toward civilization, passing a sign in Warsaw that cheerily read, "Happy Spring!"

What is this Spring you speak of?

Back in Jackson Ward, I was very surprised to see that the power had gone off in my absence, a rarity in this neighborhood. I've lived here almost eight years and lost power maybe twice.

After getting settled back in, I walked over to Saison who'd decided that Mother Nature had decreed that they run fried chicken night again tonight.

My menu was housed in a 1972 Time Life book called "The Missing Link" and I'm just nerdy enough to open it up and do some reading about Australopithecus and Neanderthal, my first on the subject since an anthropology class my sophomore year of college.

I could have done without the close up photograph of hyenas tearing apart a giraffe killed by a lioness, but I also learned (or, more likely, re-learned) some interesting tidbits.

My Mexican Coke had just arrived when the guy I'd met there two weeks ago unexpectedly sat down next to me to provide conversation and company.

He was tickled to learn about the extension of yard bird night, promptly ordering exactly what I had: a quarter bird with tonight's sides, scallion cole slaw and potato salad.

We got off on a tangent about trains because he's going to NYC this week and considering taking Amtrack. The bartender jumped on that, sharing her love of train travel and urging him to give it a try.

Coincidentally, I'm taking the train north Friday and very much looking forward to not dealing with traffic, instead spending the time reading and looking out the window instead of having my soul sucked by I-95. We were three train lovers feeding off of each other.

Two of us were soon sucking our fingers clean of crispy bits of chicken skin and discussing the importance of rationing our sides to come out evenly with our last bite of chicken, kind of the way it's essential that sandwich and chips come out even for ultimate satisfaction.

In another coincidence, he was carrying handbills for a show in the neighborhood I was planning to go to Thursday. "Guess I'll see you again this week," he said smilingly when I got up to go.

I always enjoy getting back to my stomping grounds.

That said, I don't know that I've ever seen a real groundhog. Those water men were straight out of a Gorton's commercial. There was no moon and Spring is most definitely not here. But there was this...

You'd better hurry up, hurry up, hurry up,

get busy today

You'd better croon a tune

to the man up in the moon

and here is what I say

There ought to be a moonlight saving time

I'd like to think that the moon, fleeting or no, the one I missed seeing at the river will pay me back in overtime now that I'm home.