Our gravel driveway is full of icy little puddles in which Torin feels obligated to splash every time he gets out of the car. (Wet shoes go on top of the heating vent when he comes in.) Laurel still has to bring snow pants and boots to preschool because they go outside in almost every kind of weather and they come home caked in mud. And, even though the ground might be warming up a little, it is common knowledge around here that you don't plant anything in the garden until you can squeeze a handful of soil and it crumbles rather than making a dripping mud pie.
March is the longest month in Vermont. There will be no flowers until April. There are a few birds coming back, but the trees will remain bare until May. There might be some wet snowman-making snow still to come if we're lucky, but mostly the weather is not that great. No biting cold to brag about. No deep snow with six-pointed flakes. Just a few ice storms to keep us grumbling, with some flooding and ice dams for good measure.
So what do Vermonters do in March? We have two things going on to keep our minds off the distant Spring. First comes Town Meeting Day on the first Tuesday of the month. Town Meeting is a very long-standing Vermont tradition which began in 1762 (15 years before Vermont became a state). Of course, Vermonters didn't invent town meetings- the Greeks did- but I've never seen it practiced in any of the other places I've lived. Maybe they do it in other New England States, I don't know. Anyway, here's and excellent primer on how a Town Meeting goes. Quinn attended Middlebury's this year (which was held on the first Monday night), and we both went to the municipal gym for the Australian ballot voting the next day. We voted on things like the schools' budgets, a bond for a new bridge in town, and the Presidential Primary candidates. It's real citizenship at the citizens' level and it's fun!
But the fun doesn't stop there. Lots of Vermonters like to poke a hole in a tree and spend all night tending a fire, too! March brings us to sugaring season, when the sap begins to rise in the sugar maples and all that fine Vermont maple syrup gets made. (The photo at right is my neighbor, Dayton, giving the girls a taste of fresh sap after he trimmed a tree limb. It tastes a lot like water.) We tried it one year and I made just about a pint of liquid gold from our biggest maple. It was a fun experiment, but it will be a number of years before I try it again. It requires several things I don't currently have: time, many sap buckets, time spent collecting the sap into some huge container, an outdoor (or nearly outdoor) heat source like a fire pit or wood-fired evaporator, time, and lots of time/help watching the stuff all day and night so it doesn't boil down to nothing and get scorched. It's a good thing the sap doesn't rise at some other time of the year; who could stand to make syrup in August? No, it's good, old fashioned, Vermont-style, mud season fun. Especially for those with a lot of extra time on their hands. For those of us who don't make syrup and have had all the voting fun we can handle, March is the best time to catch up on those winter illnesses we might have missed: influenza, strep throat, conjunctivitis, ear infections, pneumonia, bronchitis (that's where I get to raise my hand), the common cold, or whatever. Let's get it all out of our systems now, before the weather turns reasonable and we all want to be outside again. Do I dare to dream of dry, green grass...?
What do you do for fun in March?
6 comments:
I like the Oscar Wilde quote. I think with all the shoveling out of your driveway you've had to do this winter, that you are very, very wise.
We have town meeting all across Massachusetts, in every place that's not a city. Our town's meeting is typically in the late fall, usually focused around purchase of soccer fields and funding of new school buildings. It's right after fall soccer season so all the soccer parents are hot under the collar, and all the older folks are determined not for town assessments to go any higher. Ours is held in the middle school auditorium, with overflow (and video feed) in the cafeteria. We don't go all that often, and when I do I bring a book or knitting, since although democracy in action is inspiring, it's not fast-paced.
For fun, I read your blog. One of my favorite sayings is, " Snow and adolescence are the only things that will go away if you ignore them long enough."
You make March sound so fun I think I'll try to come up with some tradition (but not the lousy illness one). Mostly I complain that spring hasn't come yet. I keep thinking global warming will come to Cache Valley. No luck this year.
That. Sounds. Miserable. It sounds like colonial times. Or like Hazel's book about seasons, with the mud and the syrup making. The main sign of spring around here is just warming weather, which, I'm sorry to say, means all the dog doody on the sidewalks that was frozen all winter is starting to thaw. It's like playing Frogger dodging it all with the stroller and Hazel not watching where she's walking. Ah, well...
For fun I eat lots and lots of Easter candy and reorder my Netflix queue.
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I'm stuck in the illness fun of March. Maybe we caught it from you? (I'm sure not) Glad you're feeling better!
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