Time Travel

4-23-06 VERMONT: The trip to Vermont from NJ in the spring gives me the feeling of traveling backwards in time. I left a yard with trees in leaf, daffodils finishing up, red bud newly opened and azaleas about to start and arrived here to find a few daffodils and forsythia just beginning. It is in the forties and raining. It feels like March in NJ. There has been about an inch of rain since I arrived and more coming. Parts of the yard are deep mud; the clean up needs to be done again. The ponds are unfrozen and the small pond has lots of frog eggs. I saw only one lonely newt in the big pond. The pasture has some grass growing and the oxen are busy eating it. Some of the apple trees that had their bark chewed off by those same oxen are showing bud growth, but others are not, at least so far. I filled the bear feeders and the chickadees were there within an hour.

In bloom: daffodil, forsythia, red trillium, pachysandra and primrose. Red trillium has ‘wake robin’ as a common name, evocative, but the robins have already been here and working for weeks.

Intrepidly, I worked in the rain, appropriately attired, doing clean up and fertilizing shrubs and flowers, or at least the spots were the flowers will be or, rather, may be later. For those who are involved, the bat is gone.
The day before I came up here was great. I had a geology class trip to western NJ and saw some very nice formations and in the evening we went to the Met to see the new production of Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”.