That we’re heading for March first sounds pretty good this late February day! It doesn’t mean the absolute end of winter, but it is closer to spring than yesterday was and we are much in need of daffodils and pussy willows and the bird migration, which is just now beginning.

Greg Hanisek, who writes a nature column for the Waterbury paper, has been writing about the return of the Redwing Blackbird – an easily recognizable harbinger of spring. It started me thinking about other years when my friend the late Glen Swann and I used to try to spot the first Redwing each late winter. But mostly they came in early March. My mother kept a “bird log” for years and she recorded them in early March – as late as March 15 when they arrived on the Ides of March day. I remember some of those years quite well – it’s Laurie’s birthday time, and I think it was more often winter, and cold and snowy, than crocus time in March when those noisy birds announced their arrival with a loud and distinctive call. This seems to support what some folks say is a change in our seasons and weather patterns. I am happy to hear them whenever they arrive – we are beginning to leave winter behind.

Another “birder” has had the experience of hawks and/or owls around their bird feeding stations. Karl Decker of Elm Street in Monroe sent a note last week, agreeing with so many others that it’s happening in all the area, this year. Nature prevails whenever necessary. Hawks get hungry, too, and in time the pattern will change.

In Vermont, it is the time of the annual Town Meeting, in many towns. This historical expression of democracy is a bit unique in a country where progress and technology and changes can hardly keep up with itself. There is something substantial and satisfying about this one-day management of a town and its needs. For weeks, budgets have been scanned and revised and made ready to be put into one or more resolutions. They will be discussed (sometimes hotly) and argued and eventually voted upon. For better or worse, the town will honor the vote and the coming year will be played out as the wish of the majority, in a way our ancestors found to be the kind of democracy they wanted.

Once the town meeting business is either completed or recessed until afternoon, the ladies of the village take over the tables and chairs and lay out a bountiful meal. It isn’t really a lunch – there are hot dishes like New England baked beans, beef stew and “pandowdy” and maybe a pot of chili. Sly remarks can be heard about dessert, with Aunt Nellie’s lemon meringue pie and Maude’s pecan pie topped with whipped cream and a chocolate cake and caramel cake and tapioca pudding, all waiting to become the meal’s end. Whatever animosity may have flared up during the business meeting seems to have evaporated as the time to serve up the coffee and dessert arrives. It will soon be time to finish the voting and let the new year begin.

There are many stories about what has happened at this or that town meeting. They may have been acted out in anger, but the passing of time allows them to be repeated, embellished, and accompanied with a chuckle. As good byes are said, there are also reminders – “See you next year.” It is likely many of them will see one another tomorrow, but the “tomorrow” really means next year at town meeting in March.

Many of the voters at town meetings have left jobs, chores, classes, and homemaking responsibilities for the day. Now, with dusk soon to creep across the village, they start home – some facing a miserable ride, for it is also mud season in Vermont ­– others to hurry to do the evening chores.

In towns where modernization has not yet taken over, residents defend fiercely their style of government. They don’t always find the vote to their liking, but they do recognize the wisdom of it being what they need to live with for 12 more months. Represented is a goodly mix of Yankee ingenuity, a certain mode of patriotism; a pride unequaled in any other place, and a very large measure of common sense. Like the words of our national anthem, may the banner yet wave and the town meeting prevail – at least for a while longer!

The birds have still been wary all week as they fly in to snack at the feeders. Not so the “chippy.” That smallest-of-them-all chipmunk that Ed and I watched all fall, after all his relatives had gone to their dens for a long winter nap, came out last Friday. He ate whatever seeds he found under melting snow, filled his cheeks to look like small balloons, and hurried off to fill his pantry in the den. He knows it will still be wintry for a while. Saturday he stayed home, but he came out awhile on Sunday. He has since gone back for more sleep!

The column ended last week with a quotation about Abraham Lincoln by John Hay.

Who said “Surgeons must be very careful when they take the knife./Underneath their fine incisions stirs the culprit — Life!”?

Sergeant John Botsford, for whom the Botsford section of Newtown is named, was one of the first settlers of Newtown.