Springtime Peepers

Spring has finally arrived in a cold, wet dress of rain, all muddy green with fog. So very grateful to have made it through winter and also grateful for a fine winter season up at Stillwater. The Easter decorations are back in their boxes and shelved and the leftover lamb cassoulet is in the freezer for another time. Last July 3rds blow down is stacked yet again from the back yard into the shed because it's April 8th and still the wood stove burns. In the craggy branches of the seven ancient maples that guard my home are the springtime starlings busy with nest building and new blue maple syrup lines have replaced the hooded, tin sap buckets and connect my trees like a dot to dot emptying the clear sugary sap into a large orange barrel that sits on the corner. Sparky and Sparkle, my two grey squirrels are still doing their acrobatics at the bird feeders and wouldn't you know the spring peepers are migrating up and out of their cold, muddy dens and out into winter's last patches of snow. The green is ever so slowly appearing in the lawns and fields and a tinge of red hue budding in the underbrush and the yonder horizon of woods. Around five o clock each evening a large herd of thirty to sixty deer climb the hill kitty corner from my house and graze on the unharvested soybeans from last fall...very skinny but beautifully silhouetted before they run into the night, flicking their white tails and kicking up their hooves. So happy to survive to see spring.

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