Kathleen Oliver, my neighbor on the other side of Frohock Brook, wrote a couple of days ago: “As you know, we keep track of the arrival of the Redwings at our house.  They arrived this morning in a big flock. Our earliest spotting was March 7 in 2010 but this one is right up there with ‘early’.  In 2010, Andy left for his epic hike on the AT the third week of March.  We already had peas and spinach in the ground by then and they did beautifully.  Seems we’re in for another early spring.”  Those few lines got me thinking.

            The only redwing blackbirds I knew were a painting in my childhood bird book; I’m sure they live in Illinois, but not in my hometown. Redwings need water, boggy, soggy places from roadside ditches to marshes; they’ll hang out in pastures and harvested fields in winter. My manicured suburb had none of that. That was long ago; for the past 46 years the mile and a half long loop from my house to Tanglewood Corner and back again, up Beach and over to Ducktrap (though I’m still likely to call it “Canaan” Road) is my whole world. I’ve walked it and run it, alone, or with a dog, with my husband or a neighbor; we’ve chased runaway dogs, a runaway pony and even a runaway cow along that route. Redwings nest in the cattails at Tanglewood Corner, where they’re quite territorial, dive-bombing my dog if we seem to be getting too close.

            Kathleen’s note reminds me that she keeps a record from year to year of the happenings in her life.  I feel a tinge of regret that I haven’t. One of my first friends in Lincolnville, Myra Polan, kept track, too. She’d remind me when the mama turtle was due to make the trek up from Coleman Pond to lay her eggs in her perennial bed. Every mid-August I still check the outlet of Coleman on Slab City Road to see the cardinal flowers come into bloom. I believe they’re earlier these days than in Myra’s, but she always made her own trek into a spot in her woods on August 17 to confirm that, yes, the cardinal flowers were on schedule.

            And here we are in mid-March, and it’s been six years since Andy Oliver began his hike up the Appalachian Trail. I have only the vaguest idea of what was momentous in our family that spring. Somehow, keeping track of where we’ve been becomes more significant the older I get. A college friend has written in her journal every day of her life since childhood! Ralph Richards, the Lincolnville mailman of the early 20th Century, kept a daily journal from 1908 until the day he died in 1966. I plan to do better in my next life.

            Which brings me to Kathleen’s peas and spinach of the spring of 2010. According to a Facebook post, a certain Northport gardener planted his peas just the other day – mid-March! So yesterday found me forking up my own pea bed under a beautiful, but slightly cool, sunny sky. The first eight inches were soft and fluffy, then came a two-inch thick layer of frozen soil. I managed to break through it and turn those hunks over, to thaw on top. The peas will have to wait a few days here.

            By now my winter-lazy muscles were warming up, and I turned to the most unlovely part of our property, a tangle of wild raspberries, old sunflower stalks, half-rotted wood, and rusty barbed wire. One side is bordered by the hen yard, kind of a disaster in itself, and another by the woods that surround our land. Several of our dogs are buried nearby – JD, Bjelkie, Sammy, Freckles. Cubby, who died when the ground was frozen, never got a grave, but instead was carried lovingly far into those woods and left to the winter’s scavengers.

            No, I didn’t keep a journal of our years here. Instead I find the story written everywhere I look. In 1970, everything east of our driveway, the Bay side of our house, was a wild, overgrown thicket — raspberries, alders, sour apples and poplars, with a enough space cleared for a clothesline and a small shed. I’ve written how the shed met its end, pulled down accidentally by the overly enthusiastic team of my new husband and my town-bred father. So much for the “guesthouse” we’d planned on. 

           Over the next five years or so Wally cut and slashed and grubbed his way through that tangle. Down came the poplars, up went some old sheep fencing we’d found somewhere. That held our little goat herd, more or less, which tackled the underbrush one summer (as well as our baby fruit trees planted elsewhere on the property, every time they escaped their enclosure). Too late we learned goats were responsible for defoliating the entire country of Afghanistan.

           The goats were traded in for Molly, an old family cow with one horn we bought when someone told us a cow was easier to keep than a goat. That actually proved to be true. For the first few years we gardened down in the field behind the house, a hellish bed of clay that had been plowed down the slope instead of across it. My arms and back still remember pushing wheelbarrow-loads of goat and cow poop over that bumpy ground, hundreds of feet from the barn, only to see it all wash down the clay furrows every time it rained. We began looking hopefully at the former thicket by the driveway, now denuded by goats, but still full of apple, poplar and alder stumps and roots.

           About this time we read, probably in our bible, Mother Earth News, that if you made a few holes around a stump with a crowbar and dropped in some corn kernels, pigs would root up the whole thing trying to get at the corn. We had pigs and a crowbar, so what the heck, we’d try it. We generally had two pigs a season in those days, so in they went, along with the craftily-hidden corn kernels, and sure enough: within a couple of seasons, there were no more roots or stumps. And today, we have a real vegetable garden.

            But that brings me back to the unlovely corner, back behind our pet cemetery, to the place where all the old wire, stumps, and other junk got piled. This has proved fertile, very fertile, ground for two invasive plants: wild sunflowers or Jerusalem artichokes and my botanical nemesis, goutweed.

           Every spring, as soon as I can get my hands into the dirt, I come face to face with goutweed, sometimes called bishopweed, but that’s too genteel a name for this awful plant. It spreads by long strong roots, and I find it anywhere from an inch or two under the surface to as deep as a foot. It loves to hide under rocks, and twists itself through the roots of perennials, so that to get it out of a flower bed you often have to sacrifice the very plants you’re cultivating. The roots are about 1/8” thick, pale tan, and every foot or so a new plant forms. The foliage is actually quite attractive, its bright green leaves about 10” high, forming a solid mat along roadsides and in neglected places everywhere. The wild sunflowers grow from edible tubers, but are equally invasive. Even a broken tuber will sprout a new plant. We do love its bright yellow flowers, standing 8 feet tall in great swathes around our property (testament to its invasiveness), and signalling the end of summer.

           Bent over my spading fork Sunday afternoon, the best tool to loosen those ghastly roots, our whole history lay within my sight. The remnants of our sons’ tree fort hang from rusty nails on a pine beyond the hen house. The sight of it brings back, as it always does, one of my worst mothering moments, and I can’t turn away from the memory. In desperation at the cage full of 42 mice in my young son’s room, (never give in to pleas for a pair of mice from the pet store!) I’d carried it out to the base of the pine and let them go. “They’ll be much happier out here,” I told my dubious boy. I walked back to the house feeling pounds lighter, not realizing our cats were making quick work of the newly-freed mice as my son looked on. Moms have a lot to live down.

            “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie” by Alan Bradley, will be the subject on Tuesday, March 15 of the Lincolnville Library Book Group, starting at 6 p.m. This month’s selection is “a lively and entertaining detective novel set in England in the 1940s and told from the point of view of a spunky eleven-year-old girl.” Everyone’s welcome to come and join the discussion, whether or not they’ve read the novel, as the group always ends up having a great time chatting about other good books to read.

            Did you know that if you’re a Lincolnville resident you’re entitled to a free library card? Just stop in and ask for yours! Also, anyone may come in and use the Library’s WIFI connection, using either your own device or the Library’s computer. I’m told that many people take advantage of the Internet hot spot out in their car in the parking lot. See calendar sidebar for Library hours.

Hope-Appleton-Lincolnville Band Concert

           The combined HAL Middle School Bands, a 65-piece band, will perform at 6:30 p.m. in the Lynx (LCS) gym under the direction of CHRHS band director Nancy Rowe.

           And congratulations to these LCS young musicians who attended the annual District III Honors Festival: Lizzie Larsen-Leavins, Miranda Geary, Allie Morse, John Pessara, Julia Peasley, Izzy Kinney, Abi Hammond, Owen Markowitz, and Bradlee Watts.

Wednesday, March 15 Meghan Vigeant, of Hope, a writer and personal historian, will talk about the joys and dangers of personal storytelling. “This talk is for story lovers, curious people, and anyone thinking of saving their family photos, stories, or writing a memoir.” She takes people’s life stories and turns them into books and audio memoirs to share with their families.. You can visit to learn more about her work.

The music half of this Winter Presentation will be The OffBeats, a CHRHS all-male acapella singing group, is completely student-run and regularly performs in gigs throughout the midcoast. These guys are great, and I highly recommend them!

This Satuarday, March 19, Julie Turkevich will be holding her annual Pysanky egg decorating party at the Community Building. Children accompanied by an adult as well as adults unaccompanied by a child are welcome, though this isn’t for very young children as it involves flame and melted wax. Julie supplies all the dyes, kistkys (wax-writing pens), candles, etc. You bring your own eggs, either raw or blown, not boiled. Julie does this for the fun of bringing people together to create their own beautiful eggs, no charge, though donations are appreciated to help out the Community Building. Also, regulars know it’s fun to bring a plate of cookies or some other snack to share.

Easter

Adding to the return of the redwing blackbirds, a pair of bluebirds has been seen on Ducktrap Road, as well as, at our feeder, goldfinches-beginning-to-turn-yellow, purple finches, a flock of slate juncos, titmice, chickadees, both kinds of nuthatches, hairy and downy woodpeckers, fox sparrows, and, somewhere behind us, a cardinal’s been calling.

My garlic is up and the parsnips are ready to eat.