SPRING 2

THE SLEEPER WAKES

By the beginning of April, the last patches of snow had finally disappeared, the dogs were contained, and the garage roof was shored.
The loss of snow also revealed all the things that lay beneath, and it wasn't pretty. I'd begun to empty out the greenhouse's clutter, throwing the trash wood into one pile, the useable wood and flowerpots into another, and the trash into yet another. I found the Preston 'transfer station,' a rural Connecticut phenomenon our extremely high taxes support. I remember "transfer stations" in South Carolina, which were a collection of beat-up dumpsters where you tossed your trash, got chased by clouds of yellowjackets, and invariably found unwanted animals.
I dreaded taking my trash there.
The transfer stations up here are modern manned facilities that separate household, recycleable, and metal refuse. If you pay town taxes, you get a sticker and can use the facility for free, except for large and heavy items for which you are charged a fee. They are also the place you get to meet your neighbors and exchange news on Saturday.
This was truly a blessing, especially when you consider that all my outbuildings were filled waist-high with trash, old tires littered the property, and I now could begin a real clean-up.
I became a regular at the station.

                                                               Inside the machine shed

                      The item under the gray tarp is an intact wood cook stove. I did not toss this.

                          Inside the greenhouse I found a lot of antique wood as well as trash

 The barn was filled with furniture, mostly deteriorated antiques. Some pieces, especially Victorian era chairs, were worth saving.

 

                                                  Starting to clear out the greenhouse

Clearing out the machine shed. I call it this because it's where I keep my floor tools such as the drill press, band saw, and lathe. Not that I had room to use them at this point. It was trash-filled, dusty, and smelled strongly of kerosene from a leaking barrel. Note the ever-expanding hole in the barn roof to the left.

The grass began to turn from brown to green and some few plants showed buds. I raked and cut old dried stems with my weedeater for a time, but decided to park it as new plants emerged. I needed to see what perennials would come up; this was, after all, a farm.
And just as I was completing the dog fence, they all got out one last time. They found a skunk living in the barn and the Akita got a little too close. She slept outside for a couple of nights and the smell went gratefully away. I found the skunk's den, flushed it, and killed it. Others would come around.

Then there was the night I went out into the dark yard to move the truck from the barn to the side gate. I could barely see dark spots that were trash piles as I carefully navigated the yard, nearly blind in the dark. The still-frozen ground was bare of snow for the first time.
"Hmm," I said to myself in the side yard. "I don't remember there being a trash pile there." It was a smallish dark pile and I skirted it by a few feet. But as I drove the truck out of the barn driveway, a long, dark animal slunk across the road in front of me. It looked like a long, low cat with a bushy tail, and it moved like flowing water.
"There aren't any cats around here," I said. Then I gasped. "Damn! They were telling the truth!"
The guys at work had been warning me of a local creature known as a 'fisher cat.' I thought they were pulling the chain of this Arkansaw Boy. It was known to attack dogs, dig under fences to kill chickens, and even to attack small children. It kills for pleasure, often not eating but one bird after wiping out twenty chickens in a coop.
I had no doubt that the thing that slipped across the road was an example. Going back to the unexplained dark spot in the yard, I found it gone.
I'd almost stepped on the thing.

Stock photo of a fisher cat

 

                                                          Not to be tangled with

I researched the thing and found that they are of the marten family. They're actually small wolverines, if truth be told. One of the fiercest animals in this hemisphere, and right at the top of the food chain.
A week later, my neighbor saw it as well, slinking out of the same spot in my yard.
Great. Just fracking great.

I also scored a burning permit and began a weekly program of burning that which would not pollute or go to the transfer station. One of the first things to go on the fire was my collection of topiary that I cut the day after closing on the house. The bushes had to be wrested from the still-frozen ground, but they crackled nicely upon setting a match to them.

                              First burning pile; it has since been moved out of the fenced yard

Then one gray morning, rain began to fall. The temperatures broke the forties and flirted with fifty in one out of four days. A slight green flush could be seen across the land.
Spring had begun. Three weeks late, to be sure, but it was here at last.