Now it is trying to be spring.

We were late in tapping maples trees for sap this year. We made a little syrup but nowhere near as much as last year. This maple is next to the county line road between our garden and our home.

We’ve also been cutting firewood, all from dead trees. This is part of the road shown in the Walking post. We cut and split the dead oak that had fallen across the road and stacked the firewood under a blue tarp. This is in part of our woods where we decided we’d not fell any trees, not even dead ones.

Every now and again I take a decent photo. This is a vernal pond with frog eggs. The spring peepers, until they warm up, sound like slow quacking ducks. Later in the spring turtle eggs hatch and we’ll have to watch our step. The babies are about size of a nickel.

In January we had a heavy snow, about 18 inches though it was deeper in places. My mom is 95, has dementia, but is able to live on her own with our support. Every day I walked to her home, through the deep snow. The walk normally takes about 40-45 minutes one way. Until I had a path beaten down in the snow the walk took about an hour and a half.

This part of the walk is along the county line road north of our house. Our property at this point is along the west side of the road.

The night it snowed heavily there was a lot of deer activity. The next day, however, after the snow stopped I didn’t see signs of critters moving about. A couple of days later, deer were out again. Their tracks can be seen to the right of mine. Sometimes they used the path I’d created, turning off to browse. Once the snow had melted to just several inches deep there were all kinds of signs of animal activity — turkey, fox, mouse, rabbit, small bird, possum and so on.