New Ideas

New ideas

Shmuel trumpets with great abandon these days. No holding back, his call is bold, clear, LOUD, tantarah-ing that he’s the man, he’s the protector, the father, and he’s BY GOD doing his job!! Richard and I have an air purifier going in our bedroom, so his morning blasts at around 6 are muffled somewhat. Still he cuts through the drone of white noise as if to say “I’m real! I have a need here! Wake up and tend to it, PRONTO, because I’m not stopping this caterwauling until you unlatch this gate!” And so one of us hops to and is out the door to serve our master.

After the other day, we should’ve known why he was stirring up so much commotion. Geese lay eggs only during a 2 month period each year and both Mary Ann and Felicity have begun to nest. Last year they did most of their laying up in the goose house, a piece of plywood tented against one of the side walls giving them privacy. It’s to be expected that they will lay an errant egg or 2 over at Royce’s or in some grassy surround, but the lion’s share will be laid in one area. The other morning both Richard and I were witness to Mary Ann walking over to the side porch where our riding mower and wagon are stored for the winter, hopping up to where there had been a dainty spill of straw from the bales we also had stored there, and methodically pulling and placing everything in a suitable nest. It was like being present at the nativity, sans angels – we were the shepherds and, okay, the wise men. Shmuel stood and then, when Mary Ann later settled in to lay, sat very nearby, the quiet protector and watcher. He is devoted to her. Felicity sat calmly farther out in the grass and would later go up to fashion her own nest next to Mary Ann’s. Richard and I shared a look. It was all so beautiful and right. They were going to be the designators of where the perfect nest would be. It was going to be their decision. After all, they’re their eggs, they know better. And so we watched. And this morning, Shmuel was crying and crying out in a demanding way and the moment Richard let them out, they all three made a calm and steady bee-line for the side porch. Richard had put up a little plywood ramp to accommodate Mary Ann, but she didn’t need it. She paused briefly, taking in the situation, calculating the energy needed, and then she easily flapped twice and was there on her nest. Every other day is usually how it goes with the laying cycle. And today we got one from Mary Ann and a little bit later another from Felicity. Miraculous.

It dipped to just below freezing last night, but common wisdom is that maple sap season is over for the year due to the warm temperatures. For the uninitiated, ideal sapping weather is above freezing during the day and below freezing during the night. A friend of ours, Dylan, stopped his truck beside me during my dusk to dark night walk last evening and we spoke of sap and other things. It was fitting since the back of his pick-up was sinking low under the weight of a large squatty plastic vat 2/3 full of sap. Dylan is a major tree person, he and his friend Ben, an arborist, helped thin and clear some huge dead pines from our land beside our pond last winter. He agreed that sap season was over. I asked if he’d ever seen a winter like this; he had, though he hadn’t been sapping then. He didn’t invoke climate change which I appreciated since I’m trying to eradicate it from my vocabulary because in my case it tends to aspire to the level of constant complaint. I’d rather talk of solution or new idea. He reminded me that last year had been a fantastic year for sap, lasting almost to April. I asked him if we returned to a cold snap after this spate of warm weather would the sap come back. He didn’t think it would happen given the weather reports, and he continued that though it was possible, when it warms the budding mechanism has been set into motion so the sap, if present at all, would probably not taste good. Learn something every day. I hope so at least. Plenty of ideas floating around just waiting to be embraced and brought to life.

Richard’s been out in full joy, trimming up the apple tree branches. He looks like Michelangelo out there, sculpting master pieces. He’ll cut and trim, sometimes up in the big branches, and then he’ll climb down and stand back to take in the shape. His work has paid off with great tasting apples last year, the perfect balance between tart and sweet. Delectable.

Muck boots are a God send this time of year. Mud season may not be that long because the frost wasn’t too deep, but right now there’s a lot of slip slidey stuff all around whether your on foot or in a car. As I mentioned, I set off on a 4 mile walk yesterday evening just as the sun was reaching the top of our tree line. Knowing that it would be pitch black by the time I got home, I packed a mesh reflector vest to put over my black fleece and flashlight into my small backpack, along with an apple and some seltzer, a book, a large steno notebook and pen, and my Nook, just in case. I had a tureen of coffee for the beginning of the walk and it was a fine jaunt through both the mucky and the dry areas. Just another season in Vermont.

The grass is beige brown, the trees are bare, the snow is melting away, only existent in the back of our house where the sun’s light doesn’t spend a lot of time. I planted a whole bunch of daffodils last autumn, so those should be peaking up in a couple weeks or so. The trees will be budding soon, their bark blushing pink/red before they do. The pond’s starting to melt, so we should have a pair of Canada Geese flying in soon. I hope our geese and they will get along this year, but that’s to be revealed. For now, the soil and the air, everything is alive with ideas of growth and blossom and birth and green.