About that April is the cruelest month line…..
Wind tore around the house last night, howling. I left this morning in the dark, with clouds rushing over the waning moon. It was so early the sky was yet that deep blue, nearly black, just before dawn.
The nights are cold enough the warm house is welcome. The 12-year-old, teetering on that cusp of childhood and teenage-land, revamps her cardboard cathouse creation, from a Victorian three-story into a sprawling mansion. The cats, bored with me when I’m not feeding them, clamber excitedly through her construction zone.
April is that in-between month, too. Winter dying — hard, reluctant — the soil not loosened for planting peas. Every day is longer, the sunlight rushing headlong back to us. Bring it on!
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Stony Soil Vermont 
“ When that April ,the drought of March hath perced to the rote. —-“. Whoh , I’d better go back and see what Chaucer actually wrote in ,what, ? 1400 ? O K, I’ll try again, from the Prologue : “. Whan that.Aprill with his shoures soote , The droughte hath perced to the roote, And bathed every Veyne in swich licour Of which vertigo engendred is the flour ——“ I found by 1956 original textbook , which I went back to use as a guide to my comprehensive exams in 1966 ,and ordeal ,but amazingly instructive , at Middlebury. Ann’s Ipad will resist fiercely all “ misspent “ words of course, making it nearly impossible to quote Chaucer. When we bought the Creek Road house and began the huge overhaul ,it was late April, with snow flurries one day and flowers emerging such as tulips, daffodils, and the like up through the trauma of gravel piles, major.excavations the next day. Toby was there to help,with Ann and Iselin, but Toby got away now and then during times I had to finish the paperwork for our purchase, then he would fish for trout in the pond where we rented a house next door. He would fish in snow squalls, which he still does while in Spring in Norway! Thesnow is far too deep this year in Norway, and Andreas has many ski races still scheduled up intel mid May! When we were in the Oslo area in March a few years ago,we found the very first flowers sneaking out on south facing shores of little islands in the Oslo Fjord. The Norwegians announce the first flowers every Spring, but Ann and I beat the news in the papers ! Another May we wandered the emerging vegetation as the whole world exploded to full on summer , apple trees, bees ,and the works. All in two weeks. We flew in through a snow storm , walked down to the cove nearby and saw kids out with their dinghies being trained by coaches to race around the Fjord.. .Sailing boars are out in huge numbers early in Norway, far ahead of the lakes in New England , because already the daylight hours are far ahead of us in Colorado and Vermont. Right now Toby’s kyacks ,out side in his yard, are under several feet of snow, but within he will be able to paddle the Oslo islands and launch his motor boat which is there for Andreas to use for waterskiing by early May! The trees are out in Arizona now, below about 5000 ‘ in some areas, and the poor apricots are in blossom here at 6400 ‘ , but certainly doomed to freeze. In Taos , the apricots rarely survived to fruit in all our years there. Apples are chancy here too, but make a crop about once in three years. In Colorado ,peaches and cherries are are usually a huge crop.at about 4500 feet or less,but very few places are low enough for fruit. A lady close to us sells Concord grapes she grows every year. A wonderful achievement. And there is a vineyard producing wine just 10 miles from us ! Even Vermont sells a bit of wine as you know. Going out to see the snow along the boughs, before the next freeze,
Tim
Sent from my iPad
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