Can we expect a shortage of worms this spring?

Hi neighbors. Wednesday morning I saw three fat robins in my yard. Now as much as I would like to think spring is just around the corner, I fear either I or the robins are due for a big surprise some day soon.

It's always good for the spirit to be optimistic, but even robins need to keep an eye on reality. Of course I can always hope the robins have inside information I'm not privy to and know something I don't.

If the traditional announcers of spring get off schedule how will we ever know when it really is spring? How far do robins migrate?

Maybe they couldn't find enough food along the Gulf Coast since it has been so devastated.

An e-mail friend of mine commented that although his own home hadn't been damaged by Katrina or the following floods, a lot of the area was still almost uninhabitable.

If people with all of their resources can hardly survive in parts of the Gulf Coast, think how difficult it must be for birds.

I had another pleasant surprise this week. While surfing the Internet I came across a Web site maintained by a native of Scott County, Tenn., where a lot of my ancestors came from.

On this Web site were articles about early settler lifestyles and included how they did laundry, made soap, butchered hogs, made molasses and even the uses of front and back porches.

There was also a page about mountain superstitions of that area up to the 1930s. Many of the superstitions I recognized as those my mother would recite when I was a child at home.

I couldn't help but notice a lot of them portended bad news.

For example, dropping a biscuit out of the pan while removing it from the oven meant company was coming and you wouldn't have enough food to feed them all. (Back in those days, no one left your home hungry whether their visit was expected or not.) Another superstition was that a bird flying in the house meant a death in the family. One was that telling a bad dream before breakfast meant it would come true. (I suppose the theory behind this one was that if you waited till after breakfast you'd probably forget the dream by the time you finished eating and never know if it "came true" or not.)

The Web site talked about sitting up with the dead, including the practice of covering all the mirrors in the house with black cloth so a person couldn't see himself in a mirror and thus be marked as the next to die.

I discovered another superstition I didn't know about. When removing the body from the house for the burial, it had to be taken out feet first. This was to ensure the dead person didn't "look back" at someone and seal their doom as well.

There were lots of reasons not to be too optimistic in those early days I suppose, but still these superstitions all seem too dark for my liking.

These superstitions aren't that limited to one locality I think. Of course, I grew up knowing them because my mother learned them from her mother from Tennessee.

Maybe we should only remember superstitions that bode good will or good news. Like peeling an apple without breaking the peeling means you will get a wish fulfilled. Seeing a falling star means you will get a wish granted. Of course these are both time-tested superstitions that obviously haven't worked or every wisher in the world would be rich, healthy and living with their prince or princess in some happily ever after glow.

Still, good superstitions are better than bad omens in my book. Which brings me back to the robins. Robins are supposed to mean spring is here. Bag worms and woolly worms and persimmon pits are supposed to indicate hard winters.

Maybe with the weather changes due to global warming, all the old "signs" no longer apply. (If they ever did.

I mean does anyone ever really keep track of these things?) It has been confirmed that we are losing the ice caps at both the North and South Poles. I don't know how adaptable I'll be if spring no longer follows winter.

What with robins showing up in January, how can we know the whole world isn't going contrary! There should be some things we can rely on, some things that never change. If things don't settle down, we'll have to come up with a whole new set of superstitions, omens and signs to know what to expect.

Or, I suppose, we could just watch the weather channel.

Until the next time friends remember, even robins are infallible -- but they ARE optimistic!