Bonfires

Summer? Summer means bonfires! though this may look like a small fire, it’s really rather large – as tall as my over-six-foot father. These are some big logs!

Evening Falls

Sisters

Over Spring Break a few months ago, I took my sister outdoors in the snow for an artsy photoshoot. Here are some of the best…click the images to see larger.

Prelude

When Spring is come to garth and field and corn is in the blade, when blossom like a shining snow is on the orchard laid…

Tolkien says it best, of course. Spring has returned to the dear old farmstead. The wild apple trees are in bloom, and the earth and air smell heavenly! These beauties are the sign and signal of autumn harvests to come…

How to Determine Spring

The sun is returning. My campus back in Michigan is thawing out now – the snow is melting from mountains of white to dingy hills of slushy grey, and the gutters run with the blood of Winter, falling thickly down drains and collecting in sludgey puddles in every dip of the pavement. Walks to and from classes are accompanied by the squishing sound of boots on saturated earth, and mud replaces the salt that once covered the soles of my shoes. It’s not quite a beautiful time – not if one looks down. Looking up, there is the sky – wide and blue and flawless, and sun-filled. Looking down, however, there is mud and dirt and brown grass struggling to be alive again. Everything smells of water and last year’s decaying mulch. A smell that means spring, and one I have come to love, though it is very different from the spring smells of my home in the country. Spring in the city has its own particular set of sights and sounds and scents.

Though I am on Spring Break from school now, it is still very much like winter here, back home. At least, it must be by the standards of the people I eat, study, and live with most of the year. The sun is still mostly elusive, and every day brings another contest of wind – just how hard can it blow without stripping the mountaintop bare and throwing us all off south and east into who knows where? It has snowed every day since I came home last Friday – the brief whiteout yesterday brought several more inches, and many new drifts around the barn and sugarhouse. The sheep all gather in the barn in the evening as I help with chores – any wind-break welcome. To the people I left back in Michigan, this is Winter – and a bloody awful one they would think it, too. Though the sun is currently out and shining strong, it feels like -20° Fahrenheit, and the wind is gusting upwards of 47 miles per hour. I went out for a walk to the top of the hill with Kai, the ever-energetic border collie, and by the time we returned, I was certain I’d lost feeling in my face for good. He didn’t seem much phased.

[photo credit: Emily]

But I know beneath the thickly-falling snow and the moan of the wind as it wuthers under the eaves, spring is nearly here. Not quite arrived yet – but on its way.Though the sun may be elusive, still it is there. All across the state, farmers are readying their barns for new lambs and calves, eagerly watching the udders of the soon-to-be mothers grow. They listen to the weather forecast on dusty truck radios and haul sap tanks and pipeline out to the woods, gather taps and hammers and hatchets and strike off into the sugarbush to drill the first hole, hang the first bucket. They leave vehicles in four-wheel-drive, ready for the thaw to come, the ground to soften, and the dirt roads to become scored with two-foot-deep ruts – Spring’s own warzone.

Mud Season may not be for a while yet – but the frost heaves are prominent, making speeding impossible, and sap buckets line the roads. It won’t be long before nights are lit by the orange glow of sugarhouses, evaporators boiling like volcanoes, arches filled with blazing coals hot enough to singe the hair off the sugarer’s arms when he opens the door to add more cord wood. Sparks from sugarhouse chimneys will fly up to join the stars, and soon, every night will smell like smoke and steam off a thousand front pans, maple syrup bubbling and rolling like amber fire. If the melting snow is the blood of Winter, surely that maple trickle of liquid, burning golden-brown from the spout on the front pan, runs quick in the veins of Spring.

[photo credit: Emily]

Spring – it’s a season I miss now, being away at school. It’s a season that almost doesn’t even exist, in Michigan. The days there jump from the dead of winter straight into bare-feet-weather in less than a week. Snowdrifts disappear overnight, the grass underneath them somehow already almost green. My classmates laugh at me when I call the sudden warmth summer. But it really is, to me – my Michigan home misses the long, slow wait that rightly passes in between the snowdrifts and swimming holes. There is a rush of melting, and then all is baked and dry in the sudden heat. There is no slow, steady drip of icemelt, of sap into buckets, of shrinking icicles on the sugarhouse roof. There is no softening of earth and air, no dim trickle of water flowing beneath several feet of snow, no faint and nearly impossible scent of new life, lingering in the air for weeks before the snow recedes enough for us to see it.

Flowers appear overnight, in perfect lines along the sidewalks – tulips in every color imaginable and some that are not, planted by a city worker in the wee, tepid hours of the morning. Picking the daffodils is allowed – I think – but the tulips? The unfortunate student who touches them is fined, fifty dollars a stem. There are no fields full of wildflowers free for the taking in this sudden rise of summer.

Vermont will see no wildflowers itself for a long time yet – there is still the long, slow creep of spring to come, with all its promises of mud and glory. But the flowers in Michigan will be blooming soon – imported from Europe and planted in neat rows, perfectly straight, perfectly ordered, perfectly flawless. A tourist attraction, rather than a natural beauty or nature’s phenomenon. But even that quick spring, Summer’s foreword rather than a season in itself, can be beautiful, if one squints their eyes and looks to the sky.