Crash, bang, boom.

We had a wicked cold snap a couple/few weeks ago. We saw over a foot of snow followed by a serious ice storm that left a couple/three inches of ice on the branches of every tree around. Our land looks like a game of pick-up sticks with broken treetops laying everywhere...in the garden, below the house, in the woods, on the blueberries, in the orchards. It's a mess. Slowly but surely Steve (and sometimes Becca) have been cleaning things up.

We lost the majority of a whole row of stately white birches and almost half of the gorgeous oak tree that we look out on from the kitchen. Clean up is going to be a long process. The birches smashed the grape trellis and garden fence. The ornamental cherry tree is toast but that doesn't bother me too much as it was too close to the hoophouse for my tastes (after years of hardly growing at all, it has grown tremendously since we put the hoophouse in). Funny, nearly all the trees that have grown so much since we put in the garden are gone. I can't think of how many times I have been disgruntled at them for shading the garden. The power of strong thoughts, eh?

What will remain after we get this all cleaned up is still a question. I know the garden will have sun. I know the hoophouse will have more sun (and a couple of holes in it where the oak tree punctured it as branches crashed to the ground). In the orchard, it will take years for some of the trees to come back to full bounty but others might be improved by the big pruning. The ice storm took off branches I have been wanting to cut for years but haven't had the heart to do. But what do we do with a row of gorgeous white birches that are now half their size and missing their tops. Cut them down and give up on them, or let them try to come back with bushy topped afros instead of long, straight look of the 70's? I just don't know.

But whatever happens, after the storm the sun came out, the weather warmed up. We've been seeing bees for a week and snowdrops are popping up everywhere. Spring is on everyone's minds.