Anticipation and expectation

Next week daytime temperatures will regularly get above freezing while nights will be cold. Midweek we enter the month of March and meteorological spring. Time to start watching for maple sugaring buckets and sap lines in the local sugar bush.

sap buckets in place

Photo by J. Harrington

Those of us who really enjoy maple syrup on our pancakes and waffles cross our fingers that the days warm quickly, but not too much, so sap will continue to flow. That kind of pattern also makes for a slow but consistent snow melt that helps minimize spring flooding. I continue to believe it’s unfortunate that the snow has to melt before the ground can unfreeze, but no one asked my opinion on the design of spring. Frozen ground prevents or severely limits aquifer and groundwater recharge. So, to enjoy syrup and avoid or minimize flooding, I have to temper my desire to see all the snow gone ASAP and accept some tradeoffs. Much of life is like that.

Our snow depth ranking is above average for this time of year. I’m not sure how soon we can anticipate complete loss of snow cover, but we’re a month or more from early ice out in local lakes, so I’m guessing we’ll see the snow gone well after mid-March, say between St. Patrick’s Day and Easter. This is almost as tantalizing as the day after Thanksgiving’s expectation’s of Christmas, but the arrival of that holiday is more certain than an ice out date.

Goddess of Maple at Evening

Chard deNiord - 1952-

She breathed a chill that slowed the sap 
inside the phloem, stood perfectly still
inside the dark, then walked to a field 
where the distance crooned in a small 
blue voice how close it is, how the gravity 
of sky pulls you up like steam from the arch.
She sang along until the silence soloed 
in a northern wind, then headed back 
to the sugar stand and drank from a maple 
to thin her blood with the spirit of sap. 
To quicken its pace to the speed of sound 
then hear it boom inside her heart. 
To quicken her mind to the speed of light 
with another suck from the flooded tap.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.