the cold months are a time of silence. the bird feeders sustain a quiet buzz during the precious few hours of daylight and sometimes there is coyote song on the wind or an owl mourning in the forest during the long hours of the night. The distant sound of a train whistle in the valley … Continue reading pulse
new spring shoots are usually green, but they appear in other bewitching shades: smooth, shining peony fingers the color of fresh blood; stinging nettles as violet and barbed as a bruise; the tender, fleshy pink tendrils of bleeding heart. what thrusts up from the chill, dormant earth is often astonishing and mournfully lovely. in the … Continue reading alone
spring is two-faced. mercurial. faithless. devoted. her flesh is soft as ice and hard as snowmelt. her breath is a chasm of decay, rimed with petrichor and saffron, manifesting murders of crows on the exhale. she has a face to match: weather-worn and colorless, with mud-stained teeth gleaming under blazing ice-colored eyes and a crown … Continue reading volatile
with spring cometh the bear. we're supposed to take down our bird feeders by april 1, but have you seen the weather in the northeast this year? it's 30 april and we had an inch of snow last night. i was righteously procrastinating. it's ridiculous how persnickety i get about bringing the feeders in. they're … Continue reading ursus
i know there are people who live in all kinds of climates who are happy to be indoors. i am not one of those people. i hate being indoors. i hate housework. i hate indoor hobbies. unless i'm ill or exhausted, i hate plopping down to watch tv or a movie. it always feels like … Continue reading outside
on a gentle western slope near the summit at a reasonably high altitude, wind is a near constant on the farm. i count days before i can safely burn brush. i curse it in winter when it brings below-freezing temperatures down to subzero windchills. i goad it in spring when i need it to blow … Continue reading wind
february, the shortest month, is the longest of all months in the northern calendar. day after bone-achingly cold day, grinding you down, making you question the existence of anything good besides sleep, february is kind of the worst. this year, february was... not cold. it was not 28 subzero days, each one a million years … Continue reading longest
our early spring dragged on for months with brief intervals of winter. now it is mid-april and suddenly, real spring is upon us. the early robins, which were coming to the bird feeders and glumly eating seed from the ground (something i've never seen them do), have moved off to the meadows and forest to … Continue reading sprung
it's early march, so the cold, bony death's-hand fingers of winter are rightly squeezed inexorably around us. this is usual stuff. but for two weeks, we had spring. i mean, 70ºF spring. snowdrops spring. mud season spring. that's serious stuff. one day, the grackles were back. a couple of days later, a bemused red-winged blackbird was … Continue reading heave
this intrepid blogger, hereinafter dubbed mud maiden, has just returned from a two week family vacation to california. while i was gone, the three or four feet of snow melted, leaving behind the muddy brown landscape of early vermont spring, an endless carpet of matted soggy brown grass, earthy squishiness, and manure that takes a … Continue reading error: spring not found
the gumboot gumshoe 