THE MARCH OF WINTER, OR THE WINTER OF MARCH

 

February 24, 2024, just passing the time.

Is this the way it's going to be?  Winter as March, followed by more March, and then actual March? 

A mere three days ago it was 3 degrees.  This week it will be nearly 60 degrees.  I wrote this when it was still February. 

Now it's actually March.  We're already acclimatized.

December 18, 2023,,  Looks like March snowmelt.

The pond has flooded, frozen, flooded again, frozen, thawed, frozen.   The fields are completely empty of snow.  The woods too.  Fortunately for the mice and other little creatures, the weather was too wet to mow last summer because I didn't want it mowed until the bobolinks had left their nests.  By then it was too late.  The summer of rain had begun,  Not mowing left acres of really tall grasses.  All that grass turned into hummocks piled up like miniature thatched huts.  From a mouse point of view, that is. Normally at this time of year – whatever "normally" means anymore – pathways of small creatures are only visible after the snow has melted.  Now you only see these tiny roads when they run across the field paths that I always keep mown.

Lucky mice, lacking snow, but not fortunately not cover.

Looking for snow this winter reminds me of when we lived in Massachusetts and regularly made day trips to the White Mountains in New Hampshire to ski, either downhill or cross-country, often on the kind of days when there was little or no snow at home in Lexington.  On rare occasions we might head to western Mass, but if the local snow wasn't worth much, north to the Whites was the only direction to go.  

Once again I go to the mountains to find the snow. 

 

February 4, 2024, Where the Long Trail crosses Rte 125

February 25, 2024, Wilkinson Trail Network, Moosalamoo

Melting ice on the stream, Moosalamoo

Looks are deceiving.  The hoar frost of February 4 was a temporary phenomenon.  The snow was pretty good for skiing that day, I heard.  Not great, you know, but pretty good.  At first glance, nothing looks wrong about the ski trails in the photograph.  It's the footprints that are out of place.  There are no ski tracks.  In fact, if you attempted to ski this, or any of the other trails in this area on February 25, or probably on any other day in February, you could be risking your life:  alluring downhills were unforgiving, crossed every twenty yards or so by ditches 3 or 4 feet deep that might otherwise be filled with snow but instead had mud and ice, rocks likely lying in wait at the bottom, disguised by a mere inch or so or snow.  Lovely, though, for a walk.

Not that good skiing is impossible.  It's just that where it usually is, it isn't.  You have to go find it.  

And then there's the wind.  Did we always think about wind?  When your house is surrounded by old tall trees as ours was in Massachusetts and it gets really windy one day you may think absently about limbs breaking, considering the possibilities.  The weaknesses of those big old trees are often hidden, hence unpredictable.  But still, it's not usually the first thought that enters your mind.  The wind's never really all that bad.   So I never thought much about wind.  Really crazy wild wind, blowdowns, they happened in the high mountains, tornadoes, they happened elsewhere.   The only time we ever came close to experiencing one of those was when a tornado siren started up just as we were driving into Little Rock, Arkansas, precisely at this time of year.  That tornado spun itself out elsewhere so I never did share that unlucky experience.  The friends we were visiting told us tales of tornadoes they'd been through.  One nightour friend's grandfather was blown clear out of his house, bed and all, and deposited intact on the lawn, still in bed.  There has been plenty of wind this, um, "winter" – all those clashes between warm and cold temperatures moving the air around – and scary gusts.  In the mountains a few miles to the east, in the town of Lincoln, an 80-plus wind speed was recorded on the day of the first major windstorm, and a speed of almost 90 in the second windtorm lthat rolled in about a week later.  Sobering that was. 

This year's sugaring will be, well, I don't know.  Sap started flowing in the warmth of December, and probably has been flowing off and on in these mixed temperatures pretty much ever since then.  I'd heard about a guy with a commercial sap business who had tapped about 20,000 trees in December and had 400 gallons of syrup before it was even January.  Other syrup businesses probably did the same.  Here, in my little sugar shack, everything is ready to go, and time's a'wasting.  The family members who do the sugaring are out of town.  Out of town in pursuit of snow, incidentally.  (Finland)  Maybe the weather will stabilize in the next week and the taps can still be set, the sap will still be running, and the weather will settle into a helpful pattern of warmish days and chill nights.  What are the odds?

I just saw a red-winged blackbird.  I've never spotted one this early in the season.  

Wood is stacked and ready.  

Only one jar left!

These are only small things though –– no snow, weird sugaring seasons, pond freezing and thawing, wind, but no damage here. Minor complaints.  Or maybe not. 

And now, of course, it's actually March, the real calendar month of.  Can summer be far behind?

WHAT DARK AGE?

The dark, descending?

The dark beginning in the middle of the afternoon.  That type of dark. Much rain, sleet, cloud, glimpses of sun.  No turning for cheeriness in the news, that's certain.  Not often the place to find cheeriness of course but honestly, this time it seem worse than usual. On all fronts.

Angry lake, in rare and beautiful sunshine

How will this present we have been living in look in hindsight?  Unless we're around some 40-60 years from now we're not going to find out.  But I can still wonder.  What will it be called?  The Age of Unreason?  Age of ---?

Imagine if the people living in Florence in around 1550 or so knew they were living in the Renaissance.  When the wealthy looked back on their best days as they grew old maybe they remembered them as a Golden Age. Which for them it was, literally golden, all things considered.  Those at the bottom of the heap might have been surprised had they known there was a renaissance happening, as they only just managed to survive their first naissance, never mind doing it again.  

The period of time we're living in now has been named the Anthropocene, at least by those writers concerned about climate change.  It's defined as "a period of time during which human activities have been the dominant inflluence on climate and the environment."  That seems clear to the naked eye.  It amounts to a climactic achievement in one sense, as the Christian Bible commanded humans to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."  We have indeed managed all those things.  The multiplication part was easy, and the subduing and dominating a bit harder, call it a work-in-progress.  It was 1989 when Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature."  He was a bit early.

A work in progress because with as much as we've learned and begun to understand about, for instance, animal behavior or the inner workings of forests, both are still being stressed, subdued, and under pressure, dominated, by us humans.  Working to preserve and save or sustain both kinds of living things is a pretty daunting prospect. Even more so when you consider how challenging it is even at the most local level.  Like the local level right here in Vermont.  

As for instance:  This state is seen as being environmentally advanced compared with many other states.  And yet:  On the wildlife issue our state still operates in 19th century mode.  Yes, 19th, not even 20th.  I'm thinking of our Fish and Wildlife Commission which continues to support all sorts of trapping (think leghold traps, body crushing traps, etc.), hounding, and unrestricted coyote killing, long shown to be against the wishes of a majority of Vermonters.  If we can't be good enough, who can?

We're considered fairly socially advanced too, and I suppose we are on a couple of issues.  It's easy of course when our current demographics show 93% of us are white, a mere 1% Black, and other races combined add up to no more than 4%.   We're not tested much here on racial issues, so most people come across as unbiased.  But who knows, really?  

BEWARE OF THE DOG, warning found in Pompeii

Anyway, getting back to the Anthropocene.  That's the name of an Age, not an Era.  Our own time or era will eventually be dubbed the Era of something or other.  What overarching dominating force, for good or evil, might typify the times we're living in?   The worst title can think of would be the Trump Era.  It would include both a metaphorical and real time span, the living person plus the culture that was prepared to see him as their leader or idol or whatever even before he was on the scene, and the ripple effects that exist during and will exist after his wielding power time.  Unfortunately, we are not yet at the after.  We may not even be anywhere near the after.  Now that is quite a scary thought for our country and its future.  But wait: just the other day he said when he wins he's only going to be dictator on day one.  Maybe the question he was responding to caught him by surprise.  But who knows what he really wants.  Well, actually we do. History tells us dictators don't tend to be shy about telling you what they're going to do.  They lay it right out there.  Almost like a dare.  And we can assume the worst that can happen will happen to others.  Not to us.  And elsewhere.  Not here.

 

Perhaps all will be well after all.  Just another Age, just another Era after all.  

 

 

.  

LOOKING BACK ON OCTOBER 30TH FROM ANOTHER WORLD

The end of October came around again and November moved in.

I wanted to remember October 2016.  And then I didn't.  Days passed.

I wrote something back then.

Inexplicably I came across that again.  So I am putting it up here...

Ken:  Along the coast somewhere in Peru, with a pisco sour and a raffish look.

The world is already a different one than Ken knew.  I can’t really believe that time has passed since October 30th, 2016.  The election happened. That was enormous. I went to Washington for a weekend and I want to tell him about it.  I bought a dress he hasn’t seen.  The leaves fell. It snowed, and the outdoors is different too.  

 

I’ve been gathering and reading all his notebooks. They remind me of things I already know. He didn’t like me poking around when he was alive.  

 

Ken was an explorer of the natural world. He was filled with curiosity.  He was an observer. He wanted to understand the universe.  He wanted to understand the behavior of an insect.  He loved to quantify things.  Ken was intense about every pursuit.  And he was always modest about it.  He never boasted.

 

***

We had adventures together.  Many trips we took were more than just visits to places.  They were explorations, they were adventures.  We collaborated on planning them.  Our last big trip to the Galapagos happened only a year ago. That one was his idea.

 

His interests all through throughout his life spanned an amazing range.  I loved the fact that he was always up for something, something new.  Sports he tried out were technical climbing, hang gliding (only briefly, thank God), rollerblading, scuba diving.  Others he stuck with for years:  fly fishing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, downhill skiing (even last winter), running, bicycling, hiking.  He took long walks as recently as September.

 

***

I’ve been reading through all his notebooks. There are a lot of them.  Most of them are half-filled. When he had something he wanted to make notes about he grabbed the nearest one.  When he was in a shop that sold small notebooks he picked up more of them. 

 

A lot of his thoughts he took notes on were about science.  He wrote:

 

“For thirty years I worked as a physical chemist, but I don’t consider myself a scientist.  I am a fan of science, an amateur in the original sense of “amateur” –– a lover of science.  Much of the science I love is not chemistry. Had I been better at math, I might have been an astronomer or a physicist.  Chemistry seemed to sit in the middle of all this.  The child in me was delighted by the smells and colors:  the marvel of electricity generated by chemical batteries, and the explosions and pyrotechnics.”  

 

But he really was a scientist at heart.  He wrote:

 

“It’s the sense of discovery, the rhythm of theories and ideas which enlarge, encompassing one another.  A cycle of new insights, overturning earlier insights, only to encompass them.

 

On walks he would have a magnifying glass so he could examine a bug, a mushroom, animal scat, or a lichen.

 

And then there was art, and opera, music, and the theater––until his hearing got so bad even headphones didn’t help.

 

He was a scientist too when he was cooking, always trying the same dish in different ways, never satisfied merely to repeat it, even if I told him it was perfect just the way it was.

 

***

 

The notebooks are full of lists–shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of interests to follow up on, lists of phenomena he wanted to understand, lists of animal or plants he observed, lists of behaviors he wanted to improve upon.  There are short essays on a huge range of topics, and there are travel notes.  Some of his lists are interrupted by recipes.

 

***

 

 

More than ten years ago, after he was retired, he took a writing class in Cambridge taught by Mopsey Strange Kennedy (not a name to forget) and he began to write often, mostly about his early life.  After that he took a poetry class.  Both these classes helped him look back on his life, especially his early life.  There was a reason for that.  

 

As some of you may know, he was haunted––scarred even––by the death of his birth mother.  After she died, an aunt moved in to take care of him and his brother, but after a while she moved away to live her own life.  His dad, who by now had begun drinking more heavily, sent both boys to live with their maternal grandparents who lived nearby.  It wasn’t long before his grandmother died, and not long after the grandfather he’d begun to care deeply about died too.  Ken wrote about these losses again and again.  Here is an excerpt from his notebooks:

 

“I was young, three and a half years old, when my mother died in childbirth.  Seventy-five years later I can remember the time.  My brother was brought home from the hospital, and I have the image of a few women carrying him upstairs at our house.  I can see myself as a small figure behind them, as if I were on the ceiling looking down at that small boy climbing behind the group.  That image, and a powerful sense of loneliness and abandonment, was compelling.

 

In middle age I met a neighbor from that time.  She remembered me, and my telling her that my mother had gone to heaven.  I recalled fantasizing as a child that I could climb a tree and go to heaven to see her. She recalled how I told her I was going to go up into the sky where she was, and that I had looked like a little old man. I remember seeing a movie about a tree in front of a house where climbing the tree was linked to a grandfather and death.  I have always liked the view of great spreading trees with lower climbable branches.”

 

His actual mother was never allowed to be mentioned in his childhood household.  It was as if she’d never existed.  That was only part of his story. 

 

***

He was often pessimistic, sometimes depressed.  But he also wrote this.  He titled it “Me, Myself and I.”

 

“I want to tell you about myself.  It’s complicated because along with myself and me, there’s also my mind which has a mind of its own, so that’s four of us.  That as far as I know.  There could be more lurking back there.

 

Myself doesn’t talk much, although he wants to.  It can be hard to drag anything out of him.  He’s ambivalent and sulks a lot.  He’s not that happy a person mostly, but when he is, it’s a rush for me.  I feel like dancing then.  And laughing.

 

“I’m pretty gregarious.  I like people, I like the out of doors.  I like parties.  I like to fish and ski.  I liked my job when I had one, and I like not having one now.  There’s not a lot I don’t like or can’t tolerate.  I don’t like mean people.  I don’t like being pushed around.  Mostly I enjoy my life.”         [1/06/04]

 

***

 

In his notebooks, the notes, and the lists, drawings and the essays, are a window into his mind.   They tell me how hard he was working those last months to corral his wide-ranging interests as his brain was changing.  

 

One to-do list reads as follows:

 

1.     One:  “Gather firestarter wood

2.     Two:  Draw birds

3.     Clean trash bin

4.     Saturday night Norma’s birthday dinner

5.     Check re Bill for lunch

6.     Higgs boson

7.     Is there anything special at the center of the universe, galaxies, nebulae?  All flying away from the Big Bang?”  

 

 

He made notes about what he was reading to help him remember.  There are notes on the plots of books, and other things, like:

 

o   “How much dark matter is there?

o   The five pillars of Islam

o   Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation”

o   The poetry of T.S. Eliot ”  (and comments on Eliot’s metaphors of loneliness)

 

He thought a lot about what was going on in his mind:

 

“I am remembering a series of sketches at an Alzheimers [art] exhibition.   First there

was the initial drawing.  The initial drawing begins to change.  Face fragments and gaps appear, then distortion in a series of images, and a shattered visage at the last.  Captured is a slow loss of faculties, of interests, especially by the gaps in the image where what was, is gone, irretrievably.  Humanity is lost in the void.”

Elsewhere he wrote:

 

“Instead of the flotsam (ideas) following the current of my thought, they are trapped in the whirlpools on the surface; circulating, not following the train of thinking.  Part of brain that enables sequential steps is impaired.”  [2013]   

 

What goes on in cognitive impairment causes a loss of initiative, prevents movement on complicated tasks.  Same reason I can’t dance well.”   

 

On the next page he wrote: “Learn to dance.”

 

 

Then this, on a page by itself:   [2005, unattributed] 

 

My soul’s wings are clipped and

A devilish cat approaches in the night.    

 

***

 

Everyone who knew Ken, those who knew him well and all those who came to know him, from Vermont to Australia, knew he was a man of “sweet strength and kindness.”  (That phrase isn’t mine; it comes from a sympathy note.)  As he grew older he had compassion for every living thing.  He like sad stories less and less.

The first thing I knew about Ken was his laugh.  It was infectious.  It was filled with joy.  I can still hear it.

 

 

There are lines from an Irish ballad that have been haunting me:

 

Many the mile with thee I’ve traveled,

Many the hour, love, with thee I’ve spent

I dreamed you were my love forever

But now I know, love, you were only lent.

IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE

 

Do you really want to go there?  

  

I had a guest from Cambridge, Massachusetts a few weeks ago who told me how to avoid getting bitten by mosquitos.  Which I was complaining about.  I needed to get a Thermacell  electric repellant that kept mosquitos at a distance of 15 feet!  I know she felt I was being dismissive when I said “Hah! Not a chance!”  After a day or two she pretty much got where I was coming from.  

 

Mosquitos breed in standing water.  Everybody knows that.  What do you do when every couple of days there’s standing water, like, everywhere?  Locally there have been about twenty-two inches of rain in July and August.  That doesn’t even count September which has been producing more of the same.  And now that it’s well into that month, and almost past time for those mosquitos to quit biting, many of their predators are gone, too. Where are those dive-bombing swallows when you need them!  Why schedule such an early departure when there’s so much to eat right here?  Come on!

 

You think maybe I’m exaggerating?

Lesley, ready for hostilities, i.e., going outdoors 

The little white square above was intended to be a short video of Chris in similar anti-mosquito gear, but shown with mosquitos.  []Alas, it stubbornly refused to load.]

 

Anyway, here’s the real dirt about mosquitos.  They won’t stop biting until it cools off – being cold-blooded creatures – meaning a number of 50 degree days in a row.  So, they can stick around until October. Or maybe into October.  Apparently, by that time they are active in the day rather than the night.  Big deal.  Right now of course it’s 24/7.  

 

Can I tell you now about the crickets?  A banner year!  According to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies in Norwich, Vermont: 

“Because they overwinter as nymphs Spring Field Crickets hatch in early spring and mature enough to mate and begin their singing by late spring.  They continue singing and mating until late June or early July, when they finish laying their eggs and die off.”

They are not, I repeat, not, dying off.

 

In the lawn you might notice crickets as well as grasshoppers, not unusual for late summer.  It’s when they congregate that you can appreciate how many there really are.  My pool is one of those popular places. Crickets like to hang out on the “critter rescue” pad on one side of the pool, the idea being that, let’s say, frogs that jump into the pool will swim around trying to escape (realizing, perhaps, that it’s not a real pond) and will eventually arrive at the pad where a ramp will lead them out.*  For crickets, however, it functions more like their diving platform because, honestly, that’s how they use it.  They hop on, and jump into the pool.  Eventually, when I’m around to rescue them – the small ones get rescued by hand, but the big crickets call for the net – they will sink to the bottom.  As for the newly rescued, more likely than not, back in they go. 

It doesn’t take long for them to accumulate.  The drowned crickets (and occasional grasshopper) at the bottom of the pool aren’t a representative sample.  The skimmer basket, on the other hand...I had to put on a rubber glove before I dared put my hand inside.  A gigantic black spider floated on top.  Below, a four inch deep layer of crickets had accumulated over a period of maybe five days.

 

 

Deceased crickets in the skimmer basket, 4 inches deep.

Now, about the plants! 

This year I made a new raised bed closer to the house than the old beds that were ridiculously far away.  The harvest this wet summer has been amazing.  Basil seedlings turned into little shrubs, parsley into bouquets, tomatoes in to a bounty, and cucumbers – they were kinds of odd.

 

So many tomatoes.  This is my third batch, two having already been frozen,
and at least that many eaten in salads and sauces.

A bumper crop at my local farm and supplier of eggs:  they're giving them away!

 

Along with everything else, my cucumber plants were thriving.  The baby cucumbers looked promising.  Early on one turned green and looked to be the right size for picking, and I gave it away, expecting to have many more than I could even eat. The remaining baby cucumbers were white and stayed white as they grew. I waited for them to turn green.  But they were still white, frustratingly white. I waited some more. Then they blew up like some weirdly mutated thing. I know zucchinis can turn giant, especially when you haven't been paying attention, but cucumbers? I figured I’d eat one anyway, but it didn't have any taste. I harvested only a single, perfect, green cucumber. 

My giant, white, tasteless cucumbers

And the field!  The wildflowers in mid-summer were prolific and beautiful.  I was glad there wouldn't be mowing until August.  But August came and went without a window of dry weather for cutting, drying and baling.  Many fields around here were hayed, but the season was a poor one for almost all farmers because of so much wet.  Every farm has wet areas.  My field has a damp section, a swale, right in the middle.  It still hasn’t been mowed, and I have no idea when it might be. 

The grasses grow, and keep growing.

* When the pool was new, and before I installed the critter rescue pad, I came upon a garter snake desperately trying to get out. I saw it throw the top part of itself over the lip, but there was too much weight behind the front part to pull itself out, so it kept swimming around the perimeter.  I tried to grab it with the skimmer but that only terrified the snake, so I finally had to use my hands and lift it out. It was time to put the rescue pad to use.