Notes from the First Weekend

From the Vergennes Police Blotter:  “On March 11 responded to a report of a Valley View resident who heard knocking at her door but no one was there.”

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Snow has vanished from the lowlands.  Well, nearly.  (It’s snowing today, Monday, so this is no longer entirely true.)  Distant mountains are still white. Cliff put on his cross-country skis and headed into the woods but didn’t get very far. 

In our meadows, soggy with snowmelt, the tracks of voles and mice that were once under the snow are completely exposed, like miniature roads that snake around but don’t go anywhere.  Most every small sector comes with a round grass ball that was probably their sleeping quarters. Where did the mice go when they lost their snow roofs? Visiting cat Jasper captured at least two over the weekend so they must be vulnerable. The dogs are sniffing everywhere, noses to the ground.  They have to have their paws wiped every time they come inside because there’s so much mud. Counting visitors, that’s three dogs or twelve paws.  No one goes outside without wearing rubber boots.

Round haystacks that weren’t taken away when the ground was right for taking away haystacks are still sitting in our fields and in our neighbors’.  They’re big, maybe six feet in diameter.  Across from us there must be about fifty of them in several parallel rows alongside the road.  Carly, Audrey, Ben, Hans, and Olin spent hours yesterday afternoon and today playing tag and jumping from one haystack to another.  You could just see them from our house, running along the tops.  Carly said as she came in, “That’s the most fun I’ve ever had on haystacks in my entire life!”

It’s maple sugaring time.  Cold nights, and the beginnings of warm afternoons.  We acquired a newly built little sugarhouse along with this house. Inside the previous owners left the sap-gathering barrels, the taps and the tubing that leads from tree to tree, although they took the evaporating tanks or pans.  Chris and Cliff decided to tap the maples in our woods and spent a couple of hours stringing a gravity flow system on maybe a dozen or so trees.  At best this won’t yield a lot of sap, and the amount of syrup we get (assuming this process gets followed through to the boiling of sap) will be mighty small, when you consider that the yield of sap to sugar is about forty to one. And we’re not sure yet how often we need to empty the collection buckets.

We are still deciding how wide to make the porch.  Our family architects, Leah and Chris (left and right) are deciding.  We defer to their opinions.  Construction begins in the next few weeks.  The house looms, more than it should (fault of the previous amateur architect), and definitely needs some moderating angles.