Last day of April

Burning brush pile in Proctor. Boats on trailers. Young couple walking a baby in a stroller. High school baseball game in Brandon.

spring flood

The same logic that causes big rivers always to flow past big cities causes cheap farms sometimes to be marooned by spring floods. Ours is a cheap farm, and sometimes when we visit it in April we get marooned...The enthusiasm of geese for high water is a subtle thing, and might be overlooked by those unfamiliar with goose-gossip, but the enthusiasm of carp is obvious and unmistakable. No sooner has the rising flood wetted the grass roots than here they come, rooting and wallowing with the prodigious zest of pigs turned out to pasture, flashing red tails and yellow bellies, cruising the wagon tracks and cow-paths and shaking the reeds and bushes in their haste to explore what to them is an expanding universe...

There are degrees and kinds of solitude. An island in a lake has one kind; but lakes have boats, and there is always the chance that one might land to pay you a visit. A peak in the clouds has another kind; but most peaks have trails, and trails have tourists. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.

So we sit on our hill beside a new-blown basque, and watch the geese go by. I see our road dipping gently into the waters, and I conclude (with inner glee but exterior detachment) that the question of traffic, in or out, is for this day at least, debatable only among carp.

April
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold

sprouts

Out walking in East Aurora, New York. Bluets were everywhere.

These are like our Marsh Marigolds, but not exactly.

Oh, and these guys are sprouting up as well.

Finale

Away for a week. Wanted to finish this up.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Two Tramps in Mud Time
Robert Frost

IV

The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You'd think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.

III

The water for which we have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

Two Tramps in Mud Time
Robert Frost

TTIMT II

The sun was warm but the wind was chill,
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over a sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffled a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom,
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum,
Except in color he isn't blue.
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

Two Tramps in Mud Time
Robert Frost