The apple tree in the middle of my garden is in blossom.
It’s October, and there are flowers in an apple tree that shouldn’t be flowering until next spring.
I’ve never seen the like of it before.
Clearly, the tree is confused.
Maybe it’s sort of like when migrating birds somehow come down the wrong side of the world, and instead of heading down south through Europe and into the warmer climes of Africa for the winter, we see them here in North America.
It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, the confused bird will drive birders nuts.
We had a smew that got separated from its flock and lost its way to the Black Sea end up here in Langley for a month or two a number of years back.
I know… it seems a silly name for a bird. But still, it’s the kind of mistake you’d sooner expect from something like a blue-footed booby!
In any case, birders from around the world flocked to Langley to be able to say that they once had the privilege of seeing a de-flocked smew.
Nobody is flocking to see my October-blooming apple tree.
Just as well, of course. The garden is in disarray at this time of year, all the more so because temperatures have not yet fallen enough to weed out even the least hardy plants – even the coolest nights have barely dipped the mercury enough to so much as slow their growth.
And that, of course, is probably why the apple tree is as confused as an addle-pated smew.
This weather should seem outrageously unusual.
But it’s no longer terribly far off the norm.
In days within my memory, any summer that pushed thermometers over 25C for a week was a hot summer. It was not unusual for an entire summer to never once reach that threshold here.
Registering over 30C just one day would have inspired awe. Yet barely a recent summer has failed to threaten an approach to 40C… occasionally making good on the threat.
As we sweat the summer stuff, who is left to recall the winters of our discontent?
Langley farmers used to transport milk to Vancouver via the train from Whonnock… crossing the frozen Fraser with horse-drawn sleighs.
Perhaps hot summers and October-blooming apple trees are the price we pay for that loss.