Maple Tree Down

I was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner when I heard the cra-aack! I knew before I made it outside that the gusty storm winds had taken down what remained of the old red maple tree in the front yard.

The tree’s final demise was a long time coming. It is – or was – the middle (and largest) of three red maples near one edge of our yard. All three took root long before we lived here – I’d estimate this tree even outdates the house, which is nearly 100 years old. When we acquired the house, the trees stood in a field. Our first year here, we converted part of that field to a yard with mown grass, initially to hold a wedding tent. Over the past 13 years, the yard has played host to an array of kid things – hide-and-seek, fairy house construction, made up games, and lots of soccer.

In the center of it all stood this tree, with three large branches splitting off from the main trunk, reaching up toward the sky and out over the yard, providing summer shade, fall color, and a landing place for birds returning to the neighborhood in spring.

Several years ago, one large section of the middle maple’s trunk cracked and crashed down during another storm. And a few years after that, a second segment fell. It seemed every icy winter gale or summer storm took another small branch or two until only one of the main sub-trunks was left.

Still, the leaves from that living branch contributed to the large piles of crisp and colorful leaves the kids raked up to jump into over many autumns. And one year, in late winter, when those kids were very small – and the maple still more alive than dead – we tapped that tree and a the other red maples to gather sap for our driveway sugarmaking operation. (Yes, you can make maple syrup from red maples, too, and you can do so in a large pot atop a propane grill. Not the most efficient method, but good, clean, really sweet family fun.)

Probably because of its declining health, this maple tree was always the first to sport red leaves, usually right around this time of the summer, well before any of us is ready to think about fall. Over the last few years, it’s become a home to various fungi, a slew of bugs roaming around beneath its bark, and the woodpeckers who eat those bugs.

The day after the storm that took the last living limbs from the tree was calm and bright and sunny. A perfect August day. The only evidence of the squall that had raged through the night before was the mess of maple limbs and bark and leaves strewn beneath the tree – and our ongoing power outage.

This weekend, my husband powered up the chainsaw, my son powered up the tractor, and we cut and hauled the fallen leafy branches and the rotted bits down to the burn pile in the lower field, and stacked a few dozen round logs, already seasoned and the perfect diameter for the fireplace, onto the woodpile.

All that’s left now of the old red maple is the tall, broad trunk, ending in a jagged point of dead wood. The remains of the three main branches, stripped of bark, rise like gnarled fingers around the trunk. They no longer offer shade to those beings passing below, or hidden perches for the songbirds who flit around the yard, or sap for would-be sugarmakers. Someday, even the old trunk will come down.

For now, we’ll leave it where it still stands – for the moss and lichens and fungi adorning its remaining parts. For the woodpeckers still finding snacks within. And because the old maple has been a part of this landscape for a century or more, and we have grown used to it being there. 

 Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's August 13, 2020 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.

Grow your own

There is something about growing my own food that I love. I relish the taste of a real, garden-grown, red, ripe tomato – whether it’s tossed with my salad, cooked into sauce, or eaten right off the vine, all warmed by the sun. I find great satisfaction in going out to the garden before dinner to see what looks good tonight – the beans or the zucchini or the broccoli. I love digging potatoes in the late summer days, searching for those Yukon golds in the dark dirt of my garden.

I have no illusion that I could live off the land. I grow my own food in the summer, but I’m not much good at canning it – and even if I were, I’ve a long way to go before what I grow would sustain my family for more than a couple of weeks after the garden is put to bed for the long Franconia winter. Nor could I survive, if lost in the woods, by foraging on wild foods, because I have no idea which roots or mushrooms or leaves are safe to eat and which would kill me.

I have no intention of ever raising animals for meat. Chickens for eggs I consider all the time, but I doubt I’ll ever convince my husband that it’s a good idea. But meat, no. My brother and his girlfriend, over the course of two summers and autumns, have raised three pigs. They’ve fed them and scratched their backs and watched their quirky pig antics and given them a comfortable life. And they’ve butchered them with the help of friends when it’s time to fill the smokehouse and the freezer.

My mother tended a large backyard vegetable garden when I was a kid – rows of green beans and yellow, carrots, corn, zucchini and summer squash and butternut, potatoes and beets. I grew up eating fresh vegetables all summer and home-grown frozen ones into the winter. I remember my brothers and me loading a little red wagon with an overabundance of veggies and carting them through the neighborhood, selling squash and cucumbers for pocket change. My brother, as a small boy, grew the biggest and best tomatoes around.

In college I would return, after a school year of dining hall food, to the garden freshness of home. Then I moved to Colorado, and there was no garden in the high mountain town where I lived, and where it is not unusual to see snow in summer. My roommates and I planted pots of flowers, but no food. When the travelling farmers market was in town, I’d happily bike over and buy a few items.

It took me a few years after moving back East to build a garden of vegetables. I consider myself a novice and learn a little bit each growing season. I try to add something different to the garden each spring.

This year we discovered a wide and thriving patch of blueberry bushes in the southeast slope of the field. I could spend hours there picking those small, dark, sweet berries, and we’ve been packing them into muffins and pancakes – and the freezer for later. In the fall we gather apples from our gone-wild trees and the tamer one with the wide branches at my in-laws’ house. These, we eat fresh or press into cider.

In the late winter we tap maple trees and boil the sap into one of New England’s best food products: maple syrup. My husband and his brother and their father made syrup the old-fashioned way when the boys were boys. They collected sap in buckets and fired the evaporator with hardwood, sitting at the sugarhouse for the long hours it took to cook the sap down. A few years ago my father-in-law had a beautiful new sugarhouse built, and modern plastic tubing strung through the sugar orchard to collect the sap. But sometimes we just make a few gallons in our driveway, using the turkey fryer and a big soup pot. It’s all hard work. And in the end, the syrup tastes just as sweet, and – despite the cost of propane used to heat the pot – costs less the $20 per pint at the grocery store.

Sometimes, food just tastes better when you grow it, or make it, yourself.

Obviously my carbon footprint – a catchphrase for those of us who like to think we are gentle to the earth – is smaller when I go to my backyard for vegetables instead of to the grocery store 2 miles or 7 miles away, where the food comes from even further afield – sometimes the farm down the road, often a country across the globe. But that’s not why I plant a garden each spring.

I plant the garden because it feels good, after a long winter, to dig in the muck. Pulling the weeds and tilling the soil by hand and adding compost and forming rows is hard work, but it is good work. Planting seeds and willing them to grow – not knowing if we’ll have a late frost or a wet summer or a local drought or an infestation of those annoying green caterpillars that eat broccoli leaves – is an act of hope and faith.

I plant a garden because my mother did – still does – and I hope that someday, when they are grown, my children will, too.

I plant a garden because vegetables grown there taste more real, like sunshine and earth, than the ones you buy under florescent lighting.

I plant a garden – and harvest wild berries – because months from now, when the days grow colder and darker, there will be something tucked away in the freezer – green beans or blueberries or pesto – that will still taste like summer.

I plant a garden because it brings me joy.

March Madness

In the American sports world these days there’s lots of talk about brackets and Cinderella teams and number 2 seeds getting taken out by number 16 seeds. But the only seeds I’m thinking of during March Madness this year are the ones that will grow into vegetables.

March crocuses

It’s been 70 degrees or warmer the better part of the last week. In mid-March. In northern New England. Where last year at this time the snow banks along the driveway were still dwarfing the lilac bushes, this week the lilacs are budding. There is no snow on the ground anywhere in sight, except for a wee bit in the deepest rocky crevices of Mount Lafayette and on the high slopes of Cannon Mountain, where a couple months ago they stockpiled manmade snow to last the season.

Well, a week of summer weather means ski season ends this weekend. And I feel as if I should be planting the garden rather than making the final turns of the winter.

March Madness? I’m surrounded by it. In a matter, literally, of minutes we went from ski boots to flip flops, turtlenecks to tank tops, chilly air to freakin’ mosquitoes! There are dandelion greens peeking at us from the yard. The tulips are up six inches and look to be blooming in another week. Continuous warm temperatures mean maple sugaring season was abruptly abbreviated this year, so get ready for the price of maple syrup to skyrocket.

The birds are chirping incessantly. The peepers are singing already. The bears are up. While we haven’t actually seen any bruins, yet, the paths through our yard and fields are littered with their scat. It’s a good reminder to keep the muck boots on when we wander around outside, even though our winter weary toes long for flip flops.

Our mudroom, whose scattered piles are normally indicative of the season, is now a schizophrenic hodgepodge of chaos. (OK, with three small kids, two adults, a long-haired dog who likes to roll around in the mucky field, and two cats thrown in for good measure, our mudroom is normally chaos, just not quite to this extent.) There are snow boots and mud boots, ski pants and sandals, neck gaiters and sunglasses all mixed together in a confusing jumble.

“Mom, do we need mittens?” my kids shout as we head out the door. “Should I wear my snow boots or my rain boots? Or my flip flops?” My smallest one, age 3, went out the other morning in shorts, rain boots, a spring weight fleece jacket, winter hat, mittens, and sunglasses. March Madness, indeed.

The last two afternoons the kids have stripped down to play in a makeshift kiddie pool. Last night they revived one of their favorite pre-bedtime summer rituals: running around the front yard in circles as fast as they can, giggling in a slap-happily the whole time. They came in covered in mud and dirt, got cleaned off, and fell into bed exhausted.

Next week we return to cooler temperatures. Normal March weather, requiring long sleeves and socks. It might even snow a little bit. It won’t surprise me one bit if it snows – a lot – before summer really sets in. Really, we had a taste of winter in October, lots of fall-ish mud season-esque weather through much of the winter, and now summer in March. Why not winter in April? Or May? It’s a good reminder to all those North Country folks who lament snow in winter (hello, it’s WINTER in NEW ENGLAND!) that we don’t get to choose when it happens, but snow is a fact of life here. It’s easy to embrace snow in winter. Snow in late spring, after a taste of summer, not so much.

So, for a while, our mudroom will remain confused, as will the tulips. We’ll leave the bikes on the porch, but the snowshoes are still there, too. And while I’m tempted to sow seeds in my veggie garden, which is completely melted out and warmed by the sun, I think for now I’ll stick to planting seedlings inside, leaving them in the warm, south-facing window of the living room.

It’s a good place for looking out at the March Madness around us.