Morning conversation overheard in the Nebraska Knoll office. [Chief of Operations has just hung up from a phone interview with a reporter at the local newspaper.] “I’m surprised to hear you say it’s going to be a good season,” says the office manager, a woman in a sweatshirt who stands hunched over a desk strewn… Read More
Vernal Equinox: Kindlings
I know a family who celebrates the vernal equinox by cross-country skiing for 12 hours from sunup to sundown. Today I celebrated the blinding, healing sun while walking back and forth between the house and the sugarhouse (as I… Read More
Eye Gap and Crucial
WEATHER: It snowed for a week and then the sun came out. The sky today was blue as can be. Even the snow was blue down deep in the holes made by my ski poles. HOW’S IT RUNNING? The trees are buttoned up and have been since March 6th, except for one mild afternoon… Read More
Slowly to exhale away
“As early as 1663, the great English chemist, Robert Boyle, told the learned world of Europe that ‘There is in some parts of New England a kind of tree…whose juice that weeps out of its incisions, if it be permitted slowly to exhale away the superfluous moisture, doth congeal into a sweet and saccharin substance,… Read More
Super Hero Muffins
As you drive into Nebraska Valley, first on the left is a house where baby lambs frisk about near their mamas. At the far end of a field you may see the lights on in the kitchen of a yellow house settled at the top of fifteen broad stone steps. When I drive by towards… Read More
At Full Throttle
WEATHER: At noon Wednesday the thermometer registers 50 in the shade. Yesterday was cooler at 40; it stayed stuck on 40 all night. It froze briefly the previous night. HOW’S IT RUNNING? The trees have fully awakened; sparkly sap pounds into the tanks night and day from the 10,000 individual maple tree pumps. BOILING STATUS:… Read More
Let The Games Begin
Dear Reader, Out the window on this Monday morning after the final day of the 2018 Olympics, a squirrel sprints across the snow. Old Blue, the 1964 International truck that is not blue but green, rests angled beside the stack of pine chunks harvested from the road the day after the Halloween Wind Storm. Winter… Read More
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