Things Keeping Us Going: First Week Of Spring Edition

If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”
― Mark Twain

After a few days of unseasonably warm weather, last week ended with bitterly cold temperatures and a howling wind. Then Saturday morning, BOOM, it was SPRING. The past two days here in the Blackstone Valley have been absolutely gorgeous. It was sunny, temperatures in the high 60s. There is still one sliver of snow along the shady edge of my property, but the rest of my yard is greening up. I love the early days of spring in New England. After our long winters (which I also love), spring is life-affirming in so many ways:

Maple Sugar Days Here in the northern part of the USA and Canada, maple sugar is the first crop of the agricultural season. When the temperatures during the day get above freezing, then fall back below freezing overnight maple sap begins to rise from the roots up the trunk of the tree. This generally happens around here in late February or early March. Collecting this sap and boiling it until it reduces into the syrup we put on our pancakes, or until all of the water is evaporated leaving just the maple sugar crystals, is the tastiest of the harbingers of Spring.

Crocus, hyacinths, daffodils, and tulips I actually make a ritual of planting bulbs every fall as an act of faith with the hope that they will survive the winter weather and hungry critters. This past year, one of the groundskeepers on my college campus turned me onto his compost pile, where the thousands of daffodil and tulip plants that brighten the entrance for commencement week are tossed after the flowers fade each year. I was a sight to see, digging through the muddy heap after work each day for a week, loading buckets with hundreds of bulbs. This weekend, I saw that almost all of them are coming up!