MUDVILLE
“There is no joy in Mudville
Mighty Casey has struck out.”
A thundering silence. The swing of a bat. Whistling air. The gasps. The moans. The awful groans. Strike Three. So finishes “Casey at The Bat.” So begins Spring in the northern Catskills.
Mud. Lots of it. Mud that sucks at the soles of your shoes. Mudville. Patches of snow remain like tufts of hair on a cartoon character’s bald pate. It’s ooze. It’s ick. Sludge, muck, and mire. Gray and brown and sometimes black. It seems ugly and it is compared to Glorious Summer, Breathtaking Fall, and a fierce Winter snow storm that forces the spruce trees to bow down in silence. But. Spring. There is mystery here, mystery missing from the other seasons. What they are doing (those other three seasons) is right smack before our eyes. We can see it happening, see growth to fullness, see palettes bloom then rage, breathe in what after a year of changes has become exotic. But. Spring. In the northern Catskills.
Mudville.
We cannot see what’s going on. We don’t know how or exactly where whatever’s happening is happening. What we know and all we know is: Stuff happens. Sometimes it’s warm; Mostly it’s not. Heavy winds. Power goes out. Buzzards circle the creek. Some drowned thing will carry down, and those birds will be there. It might snow. It’s snowing now. It’s going to snow tomorrow. The bear is out looking for carrion, too. At some point, white tail will crib and coyotes will hunt them. Breezes carry the freshwater creek, now muddy from the rain. It’s Birth, but nobody’s screaming, nobody’s being told to push, no cesareans being performed, just ooze, sticky, sloppy, impenetrable ooze. Mukluk ooze. Take-’em-off-before-you-go-back-inside ooze.
That’s when you begin to see other stuff.
You begin to see where that back meadow is no longer absorbing run-off and is carving out its own stream. You begin to think about what to plant to absorb that run-off. Native species? Check ‘em out. Call the county conservation people. That very smart woman. The one with the dark gray, Great Northern baseball cap. You begin to think about those two concrete urns out front that had been flush with ivy eaten by the goats last summer. Lavender would be beautiful there as well as surrounding the weeping cherry out back that once again made it through Winter, although the same damn goats (now long gone) snacked on it last Fall. You begin to contemplate another serious garden and maybe going in on a beef cow with a neighbor who also recently finished putting a new roof on our house. Venison’s again a thought. It’s been years, but you begin wondering where and how. You also begin thinking about next winter's firewood and this year’s plan to take down a half dozen six - eight inch diameter ash trees because they’re going to die by disease anyway. A green, carapaced creature, smaller than a pea, the Emerald Ash Borer, has been inseminating them for years with the poisons that are killing them now. By next winter they’ll be dry. Very hard wood. A long burn. Wasn’t Babe Ruth’s bat - his Louisville Slugger - made of ash?
There’s a rectangle of mud - seven feet long, three feet wide - from where some roofing lay on our front lawn for more than a year. More than a year without sunlight. More than a year without oxygen. It’s now a perfectly symmetrical slab of mud smack in the center of our front lawn. It was just a slab of mud. It still might be to most of us, but I bent down close to it today with my daughter, and there is actually stuff growing. I don’t know what it is - something native, my guess - but there it is. It’s scraggly and ugly, but stuff’s growing. It’s coming back. It never died. If that rectangle of mud could speak it’d say, “Move it out, Bub! My turn.”
Ooze. Yet, everything comes out of it.
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