Spring is definitely on its way ~ March 11, 1993

David Heiller

“Oh, you’re writing about mud,” Cindy said when I told her what this column was about.

Spring. That’s what this column is about, and maybe it IS too early to think about it. You meet Art Christensen out for his morning walk in Askov, and he^’ll warn you that there’s more snow and cold coming. But you can tell by the swagger in his step that he knows: spring is coming.

The signs are subtle. Grass is showing through in spots in the yard, but it’s not really grass, it’s more of a soggy brown washcloth than grass.

Patches of ice form on the driveway when we get up, but by 10 a.m. they are patches of water and mud. It’s time to put away the Sorels and put on the knee-high rubber boots, the mud boots.

The muck puts sleepy animals on the move. Their cozy dens are now swimming pools. Maybe it was time to get up anyway.

You see skunks everywhere. A young one sat in our driveway on Tuesday afternoon, March 2, calmly eating a rotting deer skin that I had been planning to tan. Luckily the dog was in the house.

The skunk looked cute from a distance. Then Thursday night, the air filled with the smell of skunk spray, stinking to high Heaven. Some songs are true: on Saturday we took a walk and found the small skunk dead at the side of the road.

In Askov on March 8, a muskrat had built a home in a snow bank a stone’s throw from our office building. He thinks that big puddle of water is a lake. He’s thinking spring.

Signs of spring in the woods

Out in the woods, there’s still a foot of snow, but you can almost see it shrinking before your eyes. It’s not the same fine stuff that fell back in December. The snow today has the consistency of cracked corn. It falls into little pieces when you pick it up in the afternoon. In the morning, it has a crust that ALMOST holds you up. Just when you think you can walk on top, UGGH, your foot goes plunging through, jarring your knee. Sore knees: another sign of spring.

It’s good snow for dogs and bad snow for deer. The dogs stay on top, the deer don’t. The two don’t mix very well. A neighbor jumped a deer that was badly cut up in the woods on Saturday, March 6. The snow, stained with big patches of blood, was torn with the struggle of deer and dog.

The birds know spring is near. The chickadees are trying to out-sing each other every morning; the blue jays are honking for a last meal. Crows are moving about, and owls hoot at night, Coyotes are howling too, which means they are mating, according to a friend, and isn’t that sign of spring?

The sap is running

The sap is running too. I tapped our maple trees on March 3. Ideal tapping weather is when temperatures get above freezing during the day and below freezing at night. That’s a sign of spring.

You hear the plunk-plunk of sap dripping into plastic buckets, and it’s a good sound. They are giving more than half gallon a day, except for the ash tree that I tapped. That bucket is bone dry. I tap an ash every year, just to make sure that God hasn’t changed his mind.

He hasn’t, so I moved the tap to a healthy maple, and the sap was flowing out of the 9/16 inch hole before I could pound the tap in.

The kids like to drink sap right from the buckets. I do too. You can taste the sugar in it. It’s cold and sweet, and it tastes like spring.

And when the air fills with the smell of boiling sap, you can smell spring. There^’s no other smell quite like it.

So maybe the marsh marigolds aren’t blooming. Eng. Maybe the frost boils haven’t hit the back roads, and maybe the frogs aren’t peeping. Maybe we’ll even get a “tournament blizzard”

Maybe the calendar doesn’t say March 20 yet. But spring is coming. It’s definitely coming.