This week brings up a question that has especially puzzled me since I began gardening in Ann Arbor: why do groundhogs get their own special day? I’m not aware of other holidays dedicated to clumsy thieves. Is it an attempt to lure them out of their burrows so they can be disposed of before gardening season starts? Tell me anyone around here really believes there is a choice on February 2nd other than six more weeks of winter.
The thing that bothers me most about woodchucks, aka groundhogs, is that when they waddle over to eat the blooms off the tops of my deerproof flowers, they smash everything else in their path. I get that they have to eat, but do they have to bash up all the other growing things while they do it? It’s true they dig such excellent tunnels that foxes will sometimes run them out and move in, and foxes kill mice, voles, and other crop-eaters. But this can hardly be counted as a direct benefit of groundhogs, since they will fight tooth and claw to prevent it.
Right now my local woodchuck/groundhog is no doubt hunkered into her burrow for the winter, but is she sleeping? Or binge-watching Netflix?
merrily on my way to a dissertation on garden flowers, the pinks I know best, when I was brought up short: the word “pink” originally meant a small coastal fishing vessel. Even the most stalwart scholars have had trouble figuring out how we got here from there – “derivation unclear,” they say – but in broad outlines it is, or might be, something like this: the boat was small; 
the word began to stand in for any of the smallest things in a group, for instance your pinkie finger, or the smallest flowers in the garden; then to one specific small flower; then the color of that flower (and the shape of that flower’s ragged edge, “pinked”). It became the canonical female color when a little girl whose grandmother called her Pinky – smallest member of the family – commissioned a portrait of the girl wearing the color.
But why not reclaim the color for its assertiveness, its kinship to the powerful red, and the way it matches the inside of my cat’s mouth when she shows her fangs. She kills things with those fangs. Let’s reclaim the fighting side of pink for womanhood. Warning: do not mistake pointy ears and pinkness for submissiveness. I have never met a submissive cat.
Something like that is going on outside right now – hard to say whether what’s falling is rain or snow. I saw footprints that looked suspiciously like the woodchuck, who should be asleep in her burrow until next month. She would not have seen her shadow this morning, but there’s nothing for her to eat so she’d be wise to go back to sleep. I wonder if she knows about Punxsutawney Phil. How did he end up getting all the woodchuck glory? Do you have to be a male woodchuck to get the job, and if so, how do we know Punxsutawney Phil qualifies? Did some foreign agency help him out? Are the deer behind this? I wouldn’t put anything past the deer.
This name is most agreeable to a writer; and maybe that’s what makes me put so many of them into saucers full of pebbles or pots of dirt, set them near my desk, water them, and hope. Other narcissi – big yellow jonquils, white, yellow, and even pink daffodils – are waiting patiently in their beds in the yard and garden, for spring. Because I nudge the paperwhites into bloom in January, they represent winter to me, not spring: winter as pure beauty. Winter to be appreciated for itself, not as a way-station to somewhere else. This is how I look at them, as a kind of indoor snow, but the paperwhites themselves lean against the window glass. They grow toward the slowly increasing hours of light.
Robin Richstone 