Fragments From Floyd

It's official. It has now passed from early to mid-spring: the pasture grass is up over the top of my rubber barn boots (almost knee high); the blue violets are almost hidden by the rangier ground coverings; Mayapple is tall enough to shade a rabbit and has blooms; and the AT is about to get its first cutting.

Not that AT... not the one that starts in north Georgia. This AT starts at the barn, goes up the valley along the "New Road", and back around the outside perimeter of the pasture, forking to come back to the barn or branching off across the creek (where the March floods carried off my hewn pinetree bridge) to follow the 'meadow'. Then there are lesser branches of it on the house side of the creek. Volunteers are being sought to begin this year's work on the Annie Trail, push-mowed to a total of almost 3/4 mile.

This morning, walking in the knee high dew-wet grass where the AT will soon appear, we heard the first wood thrush song, echoing between our ridges; tonight there were two of them, and just now, Ann called me to the back door. Listen: in the distance, up back where the blackberries grow... the first whippoorwill. What a haunting, melancholy sound.

At last the days have been warm enough so that I am startled now and then by the smell of spring... not any particular and definable smell but rather a kind of teaball steeping of winter's gray dregs with green things and warm dark earth, mosses and pollen. Aromatherapy. What the doctor ordered. Or would, if he only knew what I really needed for good health.