Spring Equinox – In the Woods

maple syrup

After reading yesterday’s post, Janet, who lives in Connecticut, tried to post this picture in her comment. It’s a bottle of maple syrup! But my blog doesn’t support pictures in comments so she texted it to me and I decided to share it here. Thank you for the sweet gesture, my friend! It brought back to my mind the memory of a spring equinox we shared fifteen years ago, when we went to the Hebron Maple Festival. I miss the smell of boiling maple sap in New England. AI describes it “as a woodsy, caramel-like fragrance that signifies the start of spring and the process of making maple syrup.”

a blessing of spring

When the Spring is in the offing,
And the early birds are freezing,
When one-half the folks are coughing,
And the other half are sneezing;
When the sun is getting higher,
Though the fact’s hard to remember;
And you huddle by the fire
Twice as cold as in December;
Life and all its cares would crush us,
Floor us in a brace of shakes,
If it weren’t for the luscious
Maple syrup on the cakes.

But a fellow keeps postponing
Day by day his preparation
For the final telephoning
For old Charon’s transportation.
Though he knows the Spring is lying
And his grippe is undiminished,
Still he does put off his dying
Till that can of syrup’s finished.
Then, at last, the north winds waver,
And the sleeping Spring awakes;
But we know the true lifesaver
Was the syrup on the cakes!

~ Walter G. Doty
(The Christian Advocate, March 22, 1917)

four seasons photo hunt

Back in January of this year, Karma (Karma’s When I Feel Like It Blog) suggested a four seasons photo hunt. I decided to include four more “seasons,” taking photos on Groundhog Day, May Day, Lammas Day and Halloween, which fall between the solstices and equinoxes. I will come back and add the final picture to this post when we get to the winter solstice.

Courtyard Gardens
North Carolina Botanical Garden

6.21.24 ~ (the day after) Summer Solstice

10.30.24 ~ (the day before) All Hallow’s Eve

12.20.24 ~ (the day before) Winter Solstice

early spring in the arboretum

3.17.24 ~ pineland phlox
Coker Arboretum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

This post is my contribution to Karma’s Signs of Spring Photo Hunt. I don’t have a prime lens, but the photos, except for the birds, were taken at about the same focal length with my zoom lens. (There was a lot of squatting involved to get the pictures.) Visit Karma’s post here if you’d like to participate.

It was spring break at UNC and we learned that we could easily find a parking space on campus when the students are out of town. And that meant we could finally visit the lovely Coker Arboretum, 5 wooded acres in the middle of a college campus. I came home with more than 300 photographs! What follows is a small sample of the birds and blooms we saw. Some of the plants were from other parts of the world.

I was especially attracted to the tiny South American spring starflowers which carpeted some of the garden plots. Something about those little purple lines on the petals. And the European spring snowflakes captivated me. They were a little bigger than our snowdrops. When I got home I learned they were native to southern Europe, all the way east to Ukraine, so I wondered if any of my ancestors had them in their gardens to welcome spring over there.

at the spring equinox

At the Spring Equinox, nature is stretching awake and we, too, surface from our winter stillness, driven on by the growing light and warmth of the sun. Alban Eilir is the dawn of the year. It brings with it a sense of hope and the fresh possibilities of a new day. We see everywhere the vibrant spirit of the Earth, whose irrepressible life bursts forth in the opening of buds, the surfacing of shoots, and the golden blossoming of primrose, daffodil, broom and forsythia. All life must rise up from the dark soil and break out of the safety of womb and egg.
~ Maria Ede-Weaving
(The Essential Book of Druidry: Connect with the Spirit of Nature)

silent sunday

Easter Sunday 1962
Barbara, 5, and Beverly, 4

spring is surely coming

Oh, spring is surely coming,
Her couriers fill the air;
Each morn are new arrivals,
Each night her ways prepare;
I scent her fragrant garments,
Her foot is on the stair.
~ John Burroughs
(Bird & Bough)

~ spring equinox ~
(5:24 pm eastern time zone)

maple syrup for sale

sunrise at home, 6:52 am, Spring Equinox

3.20.22 ~ Goshen Hill Maples, Lebanon, Connecticut

In our area the spring equinox comes close to the traditional weekend of the maple sugarhouse open houses, fun places to visit to celebrate spring and see how maple syrup is made. Sadly though, probably due to climate change, the sap stopped running and the last boil of the season happened on Friday, two days before we got to Goshen Hill Maples. The friendly couple running this one, though, had a fire going and boiled water to illustrate the process to visitors.

the little sugarhouse, the evaporator is just inside the barn door

a few of the 700+ sugar maple trees that are tapped

It seems the days of tapping a tree and hanging a bucket under the spout to collect the sap are gone by. These days tubes bring the sap to the holding tanks and then to the evaporator. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to yield 1 gallon of syrup. One tree will produce about 10 to 20 gallons of sap, or a quart to a half gallon of syrup.

I get a lesson in bottling (using water) the syrup

We bought two quarts of their maple syrup which should last us for a year. 🙂 I have a salmon recipe that uses maple syrup in the marinade which we have at least once a week. Our days of eating pancakes or waffles with maple syrup are long gone, but we have many fond memories of the deliciously sweet weekend breakfasts.

the great spring murmur

The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. … Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.
~ Jack London
(The Call of the Wild)