March 18, 2025
Rocky woke me about 1:30 am on the 14th of the month (the Ides of March!), and I caught the blood moon high in a clear, starry, sky. The blood moon is an eclipse, with the moon passing through the earth's shadow. It seems like such an astronomically (excuse the pun!) small window of opportunity that one wonders that it ever happens.
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A friend of Rain does maple - that is, her family has trees and buckets and a big square kettle in an open maple shed, and each year they make syrup. The maple woman says that she does not run lines from the trees, because there is importance in the carrying of the full pails of "water" - the french is "l'eau" - from the forest down to the maple shed. There is magic in the process. It is a ritual, ephemeral, lasting only one or two weeks. It is only in these few days when the temperature fluctuates between frost and warmth, that the sap is good for cooking. Fire helps the magic, boiling the water in wide square steel vats, fragrant vapor rising, witch's transformation.
Our host poured me a glass of the water, ladled from beneath the rising fumes, and added gin. What a magical beverage, I could taste the tree! Many friends and neighbours were invited to be present. There were children, running and chattering, dogs, babies and grandmothers. I wish that I had taken pictures, because the setting was delightful: around and up and down went the path between the neat and several sheds, and we clustered about at a crossway, fortunate guests. Warm wind blew down the mountain, steep above us. It was the second or third day of a thaw and the temperature reached mid-teens.
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The snow began to disappear quickly in the warmth. I was able to get to this corner of our house for the first time since the fall, and had a view of the snowbound woodshed. It is hard to imagine the snow ever clearing!
With the thaw, the roads have become treacherous, muddy, barely passable. Every year it is the same; the roads are not paved, and mostly dirt passes for gravel, so the ruts can be inches deep, soft as butter, slippery slurry. The delivery guy got stuck on the apron of our driveway (also a mud trap, just now) on Sunday, but managed to get his van free using plastic traction mats. I went out to help, as we have excellent traction grates in the car, but it wasn't necessary, after all. The silver lining was mine, as I knew then to avoid that spot, when I took the car out. Otherwise it would have been me in that mess.
See how the yard is mostly cleared of snow already! The spring burst is so sudden, abrupt, a startlingly severe change. Skeins of geese are arriving, and I have seen a red-winged blackbird already - it seems much earlier than they usually show up in Etobicoke - and two robins came to the vineyard yesterday. Of course, on the first warm day there were small flying insects on the green and brown lawn, beetles, flies, and caterpillars. Nature doesn't waste time.
Everywhere, even across the yard, melt-water pours. I like to go out at night when other sounds are hushed, and listen to the hundred small streams racing down the hills to the Missisquoi valley. The water doesn't bother finding a creek bed; it rushes headlong down the straightest path between the stones and grassy bumps.
This was the yard only days ago, still snow-covered. (Rocky heads over to meet Blackie.)
The brown veins across the grass are mouse trails, only an inch deep, which the mice make under the snow, through the roots of the grass.
I was able to walk over to the ridge, another first since the fall, to see the stream. It is flooding over the bridge and already green shoots are rising in the shallow marsh. Rocky seems to be feeling the fever, he is needy and frisky, shedding more white fluffy undercoat. How can there be so much?
I feel the rush of spring in myself, a glad, childish joy, surprising, utterly new. My eyes are wide open, breathing short and shallow. I find myself working: cooking more, cleaning, preparing for the trips home, the first in April, the second and last, in June.
I have even returned to work on the blue cave, starting to see my way, what to do first and where. Many projects can be done in stages, in the same order, first placing "signature pieces", bits of tree and flower, fish and birds, handles and spouts, then laying the paving of flat patterned china. Finally the grouting is done, in small areas a few inches across, smoothing and clearing as you go. But the nature of the cave is such that I must complete the work at the far end, before putting in the three-dimensional pieces in front of it, because I will not be able to reach the back safely once they are placed. I remembered that I usually create matched pathways across and about the base, and promptly broke shards of the four or five main china patterns I am using, preparatory to laying said paths, and seeing at last how the curving undersea waves, that I imagined when I long ago began this work, would come to be. It was the summer of 2020 when I first cut the bottom off the vase; June of 22 when the first mosaicking began. Since then, I have become overwhelmed by the complexity involved in its completion.
I have the vase upended in a laundry basket so that I can work at the back without all the pieces falling down.
Here is the far end, some of it already grouted. The blue circle is the hole at the "top" of the vase. Orange china-crayon marks places where taller figures will go, later on.
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There was music twice last week, as well. More magic, as several friends gathered at Rain and Tal's farm to play and sing. I cherish these afternoons, knowing that there will not be many left for me to attend.
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The stump with the teapot pieces is uncovered for the first time since November. The other big stump by the house has also been hidden, just about as long. I love that this one is here; it is its own small world, with plants growing out of it, and small stones and bird bones littering the top.
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Fire in the morning:
Be well. It is almost the equinox. We have made it through the winter.
Mumma Yaga
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