Breaking through

I live for March!

Okay, maybe because it’s my birth month. Fifty-seven years ago today, I was born between two blizzards, so March is in my blood.

But “they” say that, in the arts, what makes a successful work is tension between opposing forces. That’s a perfect description of this crazy, mixed-up month.

Winter keeps trying to hang on; spring keeps trying to break through. Every day, in myriad ways, the conflict continues. Water breaking through ice. Plants breaking through frozen ground. Sun breaking through clouds.

Recent days have been classic: Sunny and in the forties with bluebird skies, then, rain, snow, ice, mud. Today we had squalls that made the world look like one of those snowglobes you shake at Christmas, followed by bright stabs of sun and biting winds, through which it kept snowing. Temps inched up to nip the bottom of the freezing mark but didn’t quite make it, though if you stood in a sheltered spot, you could take off your hat and coat.

One of my favorite sounds is the roar of meltwater cascading off the hills and filling the rivers, which then bludgeon the ice apart and flood their banks in a brown-green roiling torrent.

One of my favorite sights is the first redwing blackbird atop the apple tree, scouting for open water and ground, preceded or followed by flocks of other birds returning from the tropics or vacating their winter grounds. Yesterday we had at least a hundred redpolls swarm through, moving like a school of herring in waves and ripples. A few nights ago, I heard Canada geese honking their way back north out of sight above the clouds.

My favorite of all: the first daffodil poking through the mealy snow and rotted leaf litter. It was early this year, a special birthday gift.

But what makes the month really special is the equinox. It has its equivalent in the fall, but September lacks the conflict-tension of March. With rare exceptions, such as an early blizzard or a hurricane, the summer-to-autumn transition is slower, less dramatic, than the winter-to-spring transition. You can rely on the vernal equinox to be a busy time of contrasts and constant change. Gaining back light is more heartening than losing it, so coming out of winter is just plain more exciting than sinking into quietude. March is the birth of the new year, and birth is always messy and painful.

The date one is born is luck of the draw. I am so happy to have been born in March, which gives me a Happy New Year in so many ways.

Seed bee

The heck with winter—the seed catalogues are rolling in, and it’s time for our annual seed bee!

For the past few years, I and two neighbors have been convening in midwinter to compare garden plans, swap seeds, and assign tasks to make our individual gardening seasons more efficient and economic. This year we were joined by one of my oldest friends, who moved into the area last winter and spent her first gardening season discovering the differences between zone 5 and zone 3. Finally, I’m no longer the one with the worst sun, soil, and yield!

She, however, is perhaps the most zealous gardener among us, so I predict that her garden will outperform all of ours in the not too distant future.

But that’s beside the point. This year our seed bee became a micro CSA program. That’s because I will not be doing a garden. Instead, I will contribute time, labor, and resources to other people’s gardens in order to get a share of their produce.

Why am I bailing out of vegetable gardening after fifteen years? Mainly, burnout. Not on gardening, but yardwork in general, owing to the enormous backlog of projects, and the time and physical exertion they will take to complete in our brief outdoor season. Big events recounted in previous blog posts—particularly, the pine tree logout and my mother’s demise—rendered our yard and garden out of control, if not set back two years in progress.

When I add up what must be done just to clear the yard enough to mow by May—never mind to catch up on ten cords’ worth of firewood processing, and to start or finish projects that have been desired or planned for years, and then preparing, maintaining, and harvesting a garden on top of it all, around paying work that controls the tempo, and any little recreational time we manage to snatch—I either start to cry or calculate packing my car and hitting the highway and never looking back.

Not the right attitude for making things grow and flourish!

Thankfully, my generous, enthusiastic neighbors are willing to plant a little extra and share. All I have to do is pony up some cash for materials and spend a few hours a month helping plant, weed, or harvest. Then, in my own yard, I can just toss seeds into containers and enjoy happy-colored flowers. The veggie garden will be planted with a green manure, probably buckwheat, to prevent it from becoming a weed disaster. My neighbor who has done this during bed rotation claims it attracts tons of bees.

So we’ve found a way to solve our collective challenges and become better friends while at it. What a great way to spend a winter morning!

An antidote to winter

For years I resisted getting an electric blanket. Not only because of Yankee stoicism, but also because of cost and a secret fear that the thing would set the bed on fire.

Those concerns eventually went away, and for 20 years now I’ve been enjoying the luxury of an always-warm sleep space. It’s proven to be a greater luxury than anticipated, for it adds, unexpectedly, a spiritual quality to every winter’s day.

No matter what’s going on, no matter how good or rotten a day has been; no matter how I feel, physically or emotionally, when I slip between the pre-warmed covers, I am transported to gratitude. All I can think is, “Ahhh . . . life is good.”

My last thoughts before sleep are how lucky I am. How safe and warm, how fed and loved. While outside the walls the world is frozen solid, and wild creatures—as well as millions of people—are struggling to survive and suffering for the effort, I am cocooned in security. My anxieties over money and world peace and climate change and career and relationships all disappear for a few blessed hours, merely from the simulation of crawling back into the womb.

Amazing, how therapeutic a simple electric device can be!

I therefore recommend that everyone who lives in a cold climate—or even just a seasonally chilly one—and who can pull the money together run out and get an electric blanket if they don’t already have one. This relatively small investment will have a huge beneficial return in peace of mind and ease of body. All winter, every winter, year after year.

Unexpected consequences

The log-out described in previous post is finally finished. Well, at least the tree-dropping part. There’s a whole lot left over that still needs attending to, both by them and by us.

Their part is finishing the cut: limbing, bucking, hauling, stumping, and, for the big tree in the yard, chipping. Whether this will be accomplished sooner rather than later remains to be seen, as we now have snow and ice on the ground.

Our part is cleaning up slash still in the way around the perimeter, filling in innumerable holes, removing or repairing items that got damaged by dropped trunks (i.e., my garden). This must wait until spring.

That leaves the pond. During the first phase, two trees were most safely dropped across the pond, which had a good ice cover. Those trunks were then dragged out and processed, leaving limbs, branches, and pine needles galore floating around amid and atop the now shattered ice.

A few days of wacky weather thawed things enough that we could launch the good-old aluminum Grumman canoe and extract debris before it either sank en masse to acidify the water or plug up the outflow during spring thaw. Armed with paddle and rake, we poked and pulled and dragged until the boat was so burdened that we literally couldn’t move! A stiff breeze didn’t help.

Oh, for somebody with a camera! We looked ludicrous stuck ten feet from shore, laughing hysterically, while mixed moisture spat down from a steely sky and limbs longer than the boat dragged their branches like sea anchors along both sides.

Musclepower (and lack of options) eventually hauled us to land. But before we could ease our frozen and strained muscles in a hot shower, we still had to dump the load above waterline and drag the canoe back to storage for the winter.

Within 24 hours, the pond had refrozen. Although we didn’t remove half the debris in there, it has now sunk out of sight. So all that effort was probably for nothing. We’ll know in April when winter’s grip lets go.

Us vs. Them

For the 15 years we've lived here, our dooryard has been dominated by 100-plus-foot white pines growing dangerously close to the house. Two years ago, we ponied up the money to have an ominously leaning quartet taken down. It was an awesome display of human agility and power, in a confined space, completely cleaned up afterward. So when opportunity arose to deal with the remaining half-dozen potential guillotines, we called in the same arborist to get a quote for their removal.

Ouch!!!!! Too many zeroes for our pocketbook to handle.

A competitive quote introduced the option of taking out all the pine that could conceivably reach the house, and then some (adding up to almost 30 trees). It happens that the mill price for pine is up, making it economically attractive for loggers to harvest. So we struck a deal that would fill their trucks, remove the menacing trees, and make the least dent in our wallets for some profit in theirs.

It has proven, however, to be very painful. For those of us who hail from urban or suburban environments, the violence of rural logging is a shock-and-awe experience. The tearing and splintering and explosive boom! of giants crashing to the ground, which you feel through your feet inside the house, makes you want to duck and cover. The air reeks of sap and diesel exhaust, and the brrap-ing buzz of saws drills through your head. When the smoke clears, the area looks like a bomb zone. And this is controlled, selective logging performed by careful and respectful lumberjacks who minimize their impact the best they can. I can't imagine what a clear-cut must be like!

No matter the scale, each downed tree deprives birds, beasts, and insects of food and shelter, as well as plays a role in the forest chemical dynamic. Why oh why did I agree to this slaughter?

Because: If one of those aging, splitting trees hit the house, we'd be out umpteen thousand dollars and possibly injured, dead, or dealing with fire. We've already had one tree nail a car, and dodged a few near misses with large limbs.

Because: Their removal opens up a huge amount of sunlight to heat the house and nourish lesser growing things. At the same time, the wood being removed will build and heat other people's homes; and, because our own home will be warmer, we'll indirectly be killing fewer trees in order to burn them.

A secondary benefit is freedom from the constant carpet of pine needles in the lawn, on the steps and deck, in the garden; clogging the vents and other apertures of cars and equipment parked outside; and the inches of acidic compost that accumulate on top of storage buildings and material piles. Not to mention what gets tracked into the house and befouls the vacuum cleaner.

Plus, our view is now undisturbed. Step out the door to a magnificent bowl of sky! See the pond that has for decades been screened! (Conversely, anyone driving in can now see into our uncurtained living room, and observe that the house's exterior is stained and shabby, and we have plastic over the windows and tarpaper on the roof and cars in the backyard.)

So, are all the benefits worth the destruction? Well . . . it depends. The law of the jungle is kill or be killed; something must die so that something else may live. You can't get any more "natural" than that, and all the warm-and-fuzzy, tree-hugging, green idealism won't change it. You can even make a case that the upheaved terrain will benefit plants and animals. While some lose habitat, others gain it.

So why do I feel like a murderer, and mourn every time I look around? Reminds me of the lawn-mowing exercise blogged about in July 2011. It's just so damn hard to take care of yourself without taking out something else.

The big blow

As Hurricane Sandy crawls up the eastern seaboard, menacing the Northeast like Irene of a year ago, I’m reminded less of that statewide disaster than of the microburst that karate-chopped my neighbors just a few weeks back.

That event came from a line of thunderstorms which rolled in late afternoon, perfectly normal for the season. Here at our end of the mile-long, dead-end road, the cell arrived with a big whoosh! that rattled the deck furniture then subsided into a steady rain.

The following morning, my friend at the other end of the road called and said, “You haven’t driven out today, have you.”

Her ominous pause clued me in. “No . . . what happened?”

Out came the story, of coming home not only to the road blocked by downed trees but also an exploded environment.

Her house, unlike the rest of the neighborhood, sits close to the place next door. We all have good-sized parcels, but the rest of us are spread apart by our land, out of sight of each other, whereas these two houses stand cheek by jowl and their barnyards share a fenceline.

My friend’s spread is semi-open, overlooking fields and hilly vistas, and framed around the back by trees. Her neighbor’s place hunkers down under a large stand of pines. Both properties comprise home, barn, and outbuilding(s) clustered in sight of each other, and both families have livestock: my friend, two horses; her neighbor, multiple rescue llamas, donkeys, goats, pigs, and ponies, all out all day.

Far as we can tell, they got walloped by a microburst. Per Wikipedia: “A microburst is a very localized column of sinking air, producing damaging divergent and straight-line winds at the surface that are similar to, but distinguishable from, tornadoes . . . A microburst often has high winds that can knock over fully grown trees. They usually last for a duration of a couple of seconds to several minutes.”

Yep, that about describes it. In a few seconds, my friend lost 7 trees and her neighbor lost 32!

What’s really impressive is that this wind shear threaded the needle, completely missing every structure. Okay, one limb bounced off a roof, and others crunched some fencing. But somehow the wind found the only unimpeded path available through a compact maze. It peeled the maple in my friend’s front yard like a banana upon landfall, then split or dropped the rest in a line.

Nobody was home when it happened—except a few dozen terrified animals. Even they were spared what must have been a blizzard of flying branches and splintering trees. One donkey, I’m told, sproinged over a fence taller than he was. All the critters were mincing around with saucer-size eyes when the astounded homeowners returned.

Some investigation shows that the wind sliced down the wooded hill behind the properties but pretty much petered out by the time it reached the main road. It appears that only these two neighbors got attacked by the sky.

What a difference a few thousand feet makes! We carried on as normal, clueless; they were suddenly up to their armpits in cleanup and insurance claims and rearranging their operations. What caused that burst to zero in on their homesteads? Only the gods know.

But it’s proof positive that you can’t take life for granted as long as Mother Nature is running the show.