Notes from Maine - 2025/03/09
Our temperatures are above average. It’s already creeping into mud season. When I do my horse chores, I wear a 14” boot (35cm). If mud season is in full swing, there are times when my feet will sink so low that mud spills up over the lips of my boots when I wheel the cart through the pasture. I don’t mind—cold mud doesn’t travel too far. The worst is when I’m hauling a bucket of water and I accidentally spill half a gallon (2 liters) into a boot. The boots are waterproof, which means that I’ll be slogging around in a liquid boot until it soaks up my pant leg. Fortunately, it’s been nearly a month since that happened last.
The horses squish and squash around in the pasture this time of year. Cleaning their feet off when they come into the barn is a major hassle. If I’m lucky, things will firm up out there before the end of April. But it all means that warmer temperatures are on the way. I can hardly wait.
In the early spring, it’s easy to fill my head with ideas of what the summer will bring. The snow is melting at the camp—by May we can open it up. I love when the spring peepers come out (little frogs that make a wonderful racket). They usually show up about the same time as I’m opening the window a little at night. It’s a perfect lullaby. Writing on the front porch in the morning with my coffee is delightful. This year I’ll have the French doors to the kitchen open and I can enjoy an encumbered breeze through the front part of the house.
They’re all aspirational ideas. In reality, I still have several “winter” projects that need to be finished. I’m not even done with all the cabinet doors in the kitchen. No doubt I’ll be chasing the last of those goals while summer is already heating up.
Albert (dog) found a lost frisbee yesterday. It had been buried in the snow for weeks and weeks. There are still a few more out there, but I had to give up on one of them. The light blue one went down close to the creek back in January. That whole area flooded—we had a bunch of rain. It melted the snow, but also drowned the marsh in a couple feet of water. The frisbee might be halfway to the ocean by now.
When I moved here, the creek had a dam on the north property line. It made a decent pond until the culvert clogged and the whole barrier washed out. I’ve thought of fixing it, but the pond brought roughly a billion mosquitoes. I know there are solutions for the mosquitoes, but the path of least resistance is to just let the creek be a creek. There are too many ticks back there to make it a comfortable place to enjoy anyway. If I dammed the creek, aerated the water to control the mosquitoes, mowed the hillside, kept chickens for the ticks, cut down a few trees and bushes, and put some chairs back there, I could have a picturesque pond that I still wouldn’t care about. My father was a sit still and look out at nothing kind of person. My mother was (and is) a get up and keep moving kind of person. I have more in common with my mother. There are too many projects to do.
When I’m moving (working on something) I don’t feel the weight of all the things I want to get done. If I stop and let all those priorities catch up to me, they hover above me like a cloud of a billion mosquitoes.
The mosquitoes really were bad that first summer I lived here. You couldn’t even go outside in June. Now, you hardly see them. Part of that has to be the fact that the pond is gone. I have to go do something now. Talking about all my priorities has made me antsy.
