#maplesugaring

My friend down the road emails a complaint regarding the break in my signs of spring project — because there isn’t any! she writes.

True, snow returned yesterday. Enormous, lacy flakes that would have been beautiful December — say — rather than April. It’s spring, all right, but spring is a very lengthy season in Vermont. For those two decades I sugared, through an awful lot of cold and sleet and the terrible early March when 70º temperatures ruined that year’s season and a chunk of our year’s income, the word persistence has gradually evolved in my way of thinking to patience.

Every year, although I’ve lived in New England for most of my life, I somehow have this mistaken notion spring will be brief and brilliant. But autumn is gradual, too, the light at that end of the year bit by bit dwindling before it disappears.

Hidden beneath that coverlet of snow, my garlic I’m sure is beginning to stretch and prod in its lightless place. This morning, the sky bends toward blue. Here’s this sign of spring: light.

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

— Rumi

Years ago, I worked with a Bulgarian family who, every March, made little yarn dolls of red and white wool. Red for the heat of summer, white for winter. We were all friends at that workplace, and everyone wore those little gifts of martenitsa dolls until they frayed. Then, our Bulgarian friends insisted, spring was here.

Spring may come quicker in Bulgaria than it does in Vermont.

With snow falling today, the little girl left her forest fort alone, reading library books by the wood stove and eating popcorn.

Another way, perhaps, to think of martenitsa is as a great leveler: even winter’s savage teeth will yield to the persistence of spring.

But not yet… not quite yet… Vermont’s version of martenitsa is maple sugaring. Fire, sap, sugar: all eventually overtaken by budding.

The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.

– Helen & Scott Nearing, The Good Life

Woodbury, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Sign of Spring, Hardwick, VT, #7

Martenitsa, or Bulgarian Spring