Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Sunday was one of those perfect days. Temperatures in the sixties. Bright sun. Melting snow. After weeks of below normal, cloudy weather, it was the kind of day that would get you pulling a Roger Jensen and running from chore to chore. Everyone you talked to, at church, at work, in the coffee shop, said the same thing. It’s time for spring. Enough of the bland weather. Bring on Rutabaga Falls. Bring on the big melt. I walked out to the woods that afternoon to check on the sap buckets. Just the day before it had been a frozen landscape. Frozen snow. Frozen taps. Frozen ice in the buckets. Our sap boiling set up. But not Sunday. Sunday was so warm that I was working in a vest and T-shirt. I gathered 25 gallons of sap from the 50 taps in the few short hours that it ran. Combined with 20 gallons we had collected about a month ago, that was enough to start a boil. I lit a fire in the barrel stove that has been converted to a sap boiler. The sap pan was fill...

by David Heiller This time of year, it’s hard to see beauty, when all you see is mud. Ten days ago people were raking their lawns and burning their fields. Roads were drying. Mud was disappearing. Peony shoots and crocuses were popping up. Then Mother Nature dumped a foot of snow on us on Monday, March 27. At first it was fun, seeing all that snow. Some people saw the bright side. Maurice Bennett told me that the ground could use that extra moisture. But the fun wore off. It didn’t take long, maybe 10 minutes. And now, after a week of slow melting, it’s mud season again. Oh, mud. Mud season. The floors need constant mopping. And as soon as you mop it, the dog sneaks in and leaves a fresh set of tracks. Rugs get caked from wiping your feet. You could go mud-bogging on our rugs. Then they dry and you’ve got a gravel pit instead of a mud pit. You give the rug a good shake, and get sandblasted by grit. There’s mud on the carpet, mud on the car seat, mud in the bathtub...