Landaff Ledger Newsletters are available here
Summary of the Northern Pass Transmission Project
Calico Days
North Country spring means calico days - a time when the fields and hillsides are snow mottled with the browns and yellows of dead grass, the wintered-over stubble of hayfield and pasture, the dark spires of thistle and burdock, sweet cicely and cinquefoil, wild onion and rue.
Today in Landaff I saw the snow of a hillside hayfield melted top - downward from its crest of pines to the crusted drifts still in the fencerow at the bottom.
Our calico days are a little season unto itself, a special dapple and brindle time - a time like our own: mixed, uncertain, fleeting - while the year seems stopped for a timeless moment.
The heavy damp air is a sweet breath, tactile and animate. Brooks move at a quickening pace as the snow exhales, and no bud breaks.
Weeks from now I will still find an old patch of yankee snow under root or log or rock, a drift not yet wholly pried out by the sun-grainy, a dust-and-detritus collector, itself a swatch of calico.
How hard we all in nature hold fast, clutch and cling and so unwillingly let go. And how unyielding are our masters, time and chance and weather.
-- Don Wharton, Landaff Resident