The Mud and the Roaring Dandelions

Dear friends,

Did you ever notice the difference in crow caws from season to season? I may be imagining it, but right now they sound gayer, lighter-toned than before. Balmy breezes are blowing over the snow. Willows are glowing yellow against the white land. This is the season I’m calling Winter-spring, because it’s not pre-spring as I have known it. Hip-deep snow still covers the ground, so you have to be alert to subtler cues. Everyone else calls this Mud Season and I guess I’ll acquiesce to that: three-quarters of the roads here are dirt and let me tell you, this season is not subtle. I drove over Tunbridge Hill Monday in a car I ignorantly had just taken (at last) to the car wash. As I veered back and forth, slinging the car away from mud-pits, I felt like a trick driver. One false move and you’re stuck: keep it going, don’t lose momentum… I had the stern concentration necessary to a positive outcome. And there was still ice left, firming up the underneath—true Mud Season had not quite begun. That was the last time I was taking the direct route to Tunbridge for the next month, you can count on it. Too perilous. This season is so vivid around here, songs and jokes abound about it.

A couple of weeks ago we attended an event up in Cabot called the Compost Cabaret, the name striking us as funny. Music, poetry, even a group called Vermont Vaudeville that hashed up the traditional culture pretty hilariously, rewarded our drive up there. We laughed at a lot of good mud jokes in the songs and Mark’s still singing, “there’s a lot of good mud down my road”. It was a packed house amidst the drifts outside, a wooden hall upstairs above some little store in a small town in the Northeast Kingdom. Kids zoomed up and down the periphery, and a group of enterprising little girls dragged me up to the dance floor in front of the stage. It happens that I was willing to dance—I cannot resist African drummers—but I had just sprained my big toe and the only shoes I could get into were Mark’s size-13 boots. So I stood planted to the floor and swayed and wriggled, completely accepted by the group, in my strange get-up. People danced and drank homebrew and cider and cheered each act. Most of the acts were sparkling and perceptive and the crowd enthusiastic—the poet, David Budbill, received as much applause as the comedians (turns out Budbill is familiar to NPR listeners—we found his work enthralling). My biggest motivation to drive an hour for this show was to see what their publicity meant by, “And featuring the Roaring Dandelions!” When announced, the Dandelions ambled on stage and put out fantastic dancing blues.

There was a good cause at the base of it all: the evening was a benefit for the Highfields Compost Institute, which aims to create community food composting programs throughout the state, to return every bit of food waste back to the soil to sustain our agriculture for generations. With the Roaring Dandelions at the Compost Cabaret, we found ourselves in a place where sincere effort for social change is leavened by joie de vivre, because one without the other doesn’t make a good life.

Another time, I’ll tell you more about the agricultural scene up here. It is, as they say, vibrant.

With love, Josie

First of March

Dear friends,

First of March opened with a blaze of sun. March—the word just won’t conjure up the winter world I still treasure. It speaks to me of Change, even as I thrill to the new snowdrifts and the hilarious height of the snow outside the dining room windows. The sun insists to me that my world will change.

Why do I resist the coming of spring? Twofold: the glory of this winter’s consistent white, tree-decked purity and the endless bouts of cross-country skiing in unfolding fields more beautiful than any I knew before; and that I haven’t fulfilled my winter tasks that should be done before the ground opens up and sucks me into the world of growing things again.

We flung open the greenhouse doors at 8:35 this morning. That early, the heat trapped could warm the house today. It’s been 9:30 or 10:00, before. Today feels new. Ran upstairs to open the French the doors in the bedroom, too, for two storeys of heat at an outlandishly early hour. Change is in the air.

Suddenly a log skidder is blasting its way out of the woods across our field. They’re logging up on the ridge, as fast as they can before sugaring season begins when the guys—farmer Dave Silloway’s nephews-- go work on their real income stream. God it makes a huge racket, like a boy’s big toy—“and it can even drag real logs!...” They’re pulling out skinny red pines planted for telephone poles in the ‘50’s. There was a government program starting in the Depression incentivizing the farmers to plant red pines on the steeps all through the valley. Rural electrification was still a big thing and the market for the poles promised to stay robust. It didn’t always work out that way, and too many trees—non-native, shallow-rooted, vulnerable to windfall--still crest the ridges. They’re almost junk now. Mark chainsawed dozens of them fallen across a lovely old farm road that takes us up the side of the ridge on skis and walks. The owner of all that ridge land has got to maintain his forest to keep his Current Use tax-reduction status, and the logging can open the land for the best trees to grow unimpeded. Considerately, the forester and logger came to talk to us, the closest neighbors to the cutting site, about it before they began. We dream of owning a piece of that ridge and snowshoed up to inspect their work the other day: a decent environmental job.

This morning, we went to Annual Town Meeting: on a Tuesday morning! My lips fold in disapproval. Who can get there, the retired people only? Worse than that, we don’t even get to discuss as a group, intently hearing all sides, before taking a binding vote on the budget or on new land-use ordinances. We have to go to the polls instead, each in our own little cubicle, and no land-use plans are voted on. I am dismayed to find Randolph, Vermont, less democratic than Harvard.

Before we left, I saw Mark moving as usual among his seedlings in the greenhouse. Brandywine, Peace Vine—4” tall tomatoes already have That Smell. Mesclun running riot in its tray, pushing, crowding, already snippable. Basil and cilantro, both ready to season supper today, if modestly. Peppers, eggplant (even white eggplant—will I like it?) 2—3” high, though you can’t put them in the garden here until June! How that used to turn me off. Now I know that in this vale of fertility and sun they will thrive in a lushness I never had before. The lap of luxury, this valley.

Making this place work is a lot of work, believe me. Let the rigors of spring take their time in coming. I’ll gaze out the window and gloat over the two feet of snow still on the ground……………….With love, Josie