There’s a bit of melancholy here, a yearning; the sap is running and the maple syrup season in full swing but these buckets are sidelined (“Put me in, coach!!”). But at least they’re piled in an accessible place; ready for a hardy soul – still sugaring the old way – to put them to use once again.
Howard Prussack, a farmer friend, once reminded me how physically demanding maple sugaring can be; getting the sap from buckets to the evaporator requires a lot of heavy lifting. Of course most large scale operations now use saplines, and the power of gravity.
There’s a knoll in the back of our property that overlooks some wetlands. The area has long been overgrown, and there were rumors of a coyote den somewhere in the tangles. This year, though, I’ve only seen foxes there.
For the 2nd time in a couple of weeks, one has been napping on top of the hill. Not sure they’re one and the same, but if so, what looked like mange on its backside was probably just fur molting; the sparse gray is shifting back to a thick red coat. What I am most struck with are the big ears (actively listening in this photo). Stay tuned for the possibility of forthcoming kits!
Consulted a couple of books on these: Tracking and the Art of Seeing by photographer and writer Paul Rezendes, who lives in Western MA, and Mammal Tracks and Sign of the Northeast, by Diane K. Gibbons, a naturalist and illustrator who makes her home in Southern NH. Looks like they’re the front paws of a muskrat, which makes sense as we’re about a half mile from where the CT River flows into the Long Island Sound, with plenty of shallow wetlands in the area for food and shelter.
I never know what to expect in my annual midwinter pilgrimage to the Harriman Reservoir. Sometimes there is a snowpack, sometimes not; mostly it is frozen over, occasionally there are no fishing shacks out there.
Most beautiful times to photograph are on days like this one: midweek (when no one is around), overcast, perhaps snow in the offing. Taken with 35mm slide film.
Willie the Wonder Dog (aren’t they all), playing at Hamonassett State Park in 2005. We’d often take him there in the wintertime, and though he loved the wide open spaces, would never wander too far afield.
