The busiest time of day at the Burlington International Airport (excuse me, the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport as it has recently been monikered) is early morning. There are always flights at 5:30, 6:00, 6:30 or thereabouts. On a morning run, as the sun lightened the sky today, we noticed the contrails of several of those flights. They were lit pink with the rising sun. They were beautiful.
They are not natural, of course, and it hard not to wonder how they affect the weather–so many flights every day. They are literally making clouds. There were a couple of jets flying over us as we trotted along, drawing pink lines across the blue. And there were several old contrails–broken and spread wide across the sky. There were few natural clouds. The world is so beautiful that is feels odd to marvel at this manufactured beauty, but there is was, a marvel above us.
We realized that not all of these planes came from Burlington. Some were too high, too far away, traveling too fast. While we could of course find out in real time what flights were passing overhead, we did not. Instead we speculated about their departure points. Boston? Portland? Montreal? Manchester even? No idea. But it felt good to have a little mystery this morning.
It is Thanksgiving Day. I feel grateful for that morning moment–physically capable, outside in a beautiful place on a beautiful day, with an amazing woman, looking forward to a day with my awesome children. My daughter and I plan to cook up a big old meal together. We have been looking forward to it for a few days now. She knows her way around a knife and a pot. I am grateful for that too.
We also got a glimpse of a bright shooting star, even as the light grew. We wondered how bright that might have been had it been fully dark. It faded in a second. Those contrails will fade as the day progresses and air traffic slows. We will peel potatoes and pre-heat the oven and prep a pie and eventually eat it all up together. This day too will fade into the evening and tomorrow and the days to come. There are many things for which I am grateful. Right now, I am just happy to be here, trying to enjoy the moments as they come.
It makes sense to get up early. It helps to get a start on the day, to have some time before dashing off to the rat race or the daily grind or a fun adventure. The past couple of weeks I have been sick–nasty cold that won’t quit–so I have not been getting up early every day, but today I was in charge of the dogs, so I got up early to get them off to their daily routine.
The routine is to give them some hearty attention, pour out some kibble for their breakfast, and while they suck that down gear up for whatever the weather might be. In the summer it is light and it is warm, but these days it is neither. The temperature was 26 degrees this morning and, along with my insulated and hooded jacket, I pulled on a reflector vest and a headlamp. Plus a warm hat and gloves. No shorts and T-shirt and Crocs today.
It was dark, but there were some stars out. Venus and Jupiter hung out up there, glowing their glow. Skunks are around, although I admit I have never seen one here. I can smell them sometimes, however, so that headlamp comes in handy to sweep the roadside for those cute but worrisome mammals. There were none again today. Animals come through at night. The dogs can smell whatever they are. Maybe they are other dogs. Maybe they are coyotes, or bobcat. There have been bear around. These domestic creatures spend a lot of time sniffing. They say it tires them out to read through scent.
It feels like November–cold, bare trees, frost. It isn’t winter yet, but soon enough those gloves and that jacket will be habit. And the early morning light will be a distant idea. We still have another month of days getting shorter. The light will come later and later until the solstice. Later today there were snow flurries. Fall might still be here but it seems to have taken a nap. Winter has its elbows out.
I will rise early tomorrow to do it again. It will be our bi-weekly trash and recycling pickup day. While the pups chow down I will wheel out the bins to end of the driveway, then collect the breakfast eaters and out we will go. I do like seeing the stars and the red of the morning horizon, and hearing distant coyotes. The dogs will take their time, and at the end of all the sniffing we will head back inside, to brew some coffee and get ready for the day ahead.
It was wet but it was cold and white and covered the ground. It didn’t last but it was beautiful while it did. With snow in the forecast, we decked the big fir out front with lights. When we rose, darkness just slipping away, we had lights in the snow.
That spruce has grown since we moved to this house a few years ago. The first year we stood on a step ladder and wrapped a string of lights up to the top. We do not have a ladder tall enough to reach the top of the tree now. So we had to improvise. We wrapped lights around until we could no longer reach, then pulled out the pool skimmer pole, topped it with its scrub brush and used that to persuade the lights all the way around to the top. Warm weather tool for a cold weather job.
The roads were slick in the morning. This early snow always sends a bunch of drivers off the road. That happened. But by afternoon that white blanket had settled into the grass and trees and had melted off the roads. The next morning there were a few random piles here and there but little other trace.
It is early in the season. Thanksgiving is still a couple of weeks away. But it is dark early and the lights help. We will put up more, but today that tree is doing the trick. We will only turn it on when it gets cold enough, or it snows, at least for now. Thanksgiving will be here suddenly, and then the holidays are in full swing. We should make the most of it all.
It is an El Nino year, and that may mean we get less snow. But we also have climate change happening, so maybe not. I am going to hope for snow, as always. I hope for lots of snow, but I will take what we get. This snow was a good start. Cheers to that.
I wasn’t planning to plant beets, but I had some extra space. Our vegetable garden consists of a whole bunch of raised bed boxes. Every year I know I am going to plant some things, but inevitably I do not have a plan for some of the boxes. Extra basil? More carrots? Something totally new? This time one of those beds got beets.
Someone I work with had a lot of seeds. They were seeds to be given out to participants of a program that got canceled last spring. Covid canceled it, probably, but anyway she had a hug bin of envelopes of donated seeds from High Mowing Seeds, a Vermont seed company. She was giving them out, so I rifled through them and figured I would try a few. I took some carrots, some spinach, swiss chard, and these funky beets.
I mean, they looked cool on the envelope–bright pink stripes. Even if we just got a few they would be nice to look at. I popped the seeds in the ground and let them do their thing. And they grew well. Leaves came out and I just let them go. I wasn’t exactly excited to have beets. We grew them when I was growing up–bright red jobbers that we ate boiled for dinner. They were OK. I didn’t hate them or anything, but there were not really my favorite.
But hey, I am a grownup now. I am allowed to change what I like. I am allowed to at least pretend I am sophisticated enough to like stripey beets. When they finally started to get big enough to eat, I pulled up a few. And they did look cool, just as advertised. I didn’t boil them but I added them to smoothies. Because of the stripes they added less color than I had imagined they would, but they added a healthy earthiness to my smoothies, which was a nice change.
Eventually, it got cold enough that the garden was pretty much done. I pulled the tomato and pepper plants and stored their cages. I cut the last lettuce. The potatoes were safely in a bin, ready to be washed and eaten over the fall. And I pulled the rest of the beets. There were quite a few, and some of them had gotten pretty big–softball sized. I washed them, peeled them, cubed them and blanched them. Then I stored them in freezer bags and off they went to the chest freezer.
Now I can add a few to my smoothies as I like. They should last quite a while. I don’t put that many in a smoothie, I’m not a weirdo, so what I have will go a long way. I have several bags and I grew them myself, and I am allowed to add them as I please thank you very much. Blanched, they add a little more color then raw, so there is that too.
The other day I planted garlic. Generally that is the last act of the fall for the garden. We have gotten a few hard frosts. We are likely to get snow tomorrow. The beets are in the freezer and the garden is put to bed. Except for those last carrots. I need to harvest those soon, crap. But it is mostly put to bed. I am already planning for next year. I am not sure about planting beets again. It depends on whether I go through what I have in the freezer, or if I get more free seeds. When I have some beds without a plan, I guess I will figure it out then.
It was a wet summer. It rained and rained and rained. Too much rain. The field behind our house flourished. Bobolinks nested, and Meadowlarks. Grass grew tall. But we hardly went out there to explore–too soggy. But a couple weeks ago we figured we should head to the back to see if there might be any pumpkins.
When we moved here we discovered a compost pile at the edge of the meadow, next to the woods. It was filled with yard waste and garden trimmings–the stuff you cut back in the spring and fall. We added our own contributions to it. We compost kitchen scraps and some other yard bits in a bin close to the house, but the big stuff we haul across the field to this pile. It is where we toss our Christmas tree when we take it down. The first fall we also discovered pumpkins out there.
The previous owners had left pumpkins in the pile, clearly. They dropped seeds and grew, so our first fall we had a bounty of huge pumpkins, the vines stretching into the tall grass. We found a couple dozen of them, some hidden pretty well. It was like finding orange treasure. We tried to replicate this, adding our own pumpkins, plus squash and other gourds, and overgrown cucumbers and zucchini. We have never had success, but we look each year. On our first visit out there this fall after a wet summer, we found no pumpkins, but we did find something else.
I am always curious about the life that I encounter–plants, animals, insects, fungus. Several years ago a friend turned me on to iNaturalist. When I encounter something in nature I do not recognize, I take out my phone, open the iNaturalist app and snap a photo. Based on the characteristics of your photo, plus your location and time of year, the app makes suggestions for what you have seen, with photos and description. If one of the suggestions you see looks like what you have found, you select it. Then it uploads to a database where others can see it. Others can then look at what you found and agree with your identification or make another suggestion. It has been great to see when I had it right, and helpful to see suggestions that help me get it right.
On this day, across the field filled with ponded water, my spouse and I found a vine growing in the compost pile. I did not recognize the blue berries and the triangle leaves. And the stems had barbs. When we lived in Bolton we would find tearthumb growing in open areas. This low vine with barbs would do some damage to your ankles if you walked through it. This vine seemed similar but was not the same. Was there more than one species of tearthumb? INaturalist told us that it might be one of two species. Neither one looked quite right, but I selected the one that seemed closest and entered it. I figured I would look it up later to learn more.
The next day I got a notification for iNaturalist. A retired botanist in Pennsylvania had suggested it was not Halberd-leaved Tearthumb as I had suggested, but Mile-a-Minute Weed. This was not one of the suggestions that came up when I used the app, so now I was really curious. Another Tearthumb? I used the map feature of iNaturalist to find other sightings of this plant in Vermont, but there were none. So I tried Google. Nothing. The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources site let me know that this is a plant of concern but had not yet been found in the state. So I let them know I had found it.
We realized that Mile-a-Minute Weed is invasive and that we needed to pull it, but figured someone might want to see it. The next day I got two calls from people working for the state who did indeed want to see it. That afternoon the two of them, along with my spouse and I, splashed across the field and checked it out. They confirmed it was what it was and we looked around for more. The vine had spread over the compost pile but that was it. Because it grows so densely, we managed to roll it all up, pull the roots out of the ground, and stuff it into a construction-grade trash bag. We scoured for dropped blue seeds, added them to the bag, double-bagged it, and hauled it back. They took it away to destroy safely and that was that.
It was sort of exciting to find the first of a species in Vermont, I admit, but I can’t say it made me happy. Mile-a-Minute weed can really take over and smother everything around it. It has caused problems where it has invaded other places. I took a look a couple days ago to see it there was anything we missed. There wasn’t, that I could see. I will be sure to look again in spring, when seeds might sprout. We could have buried one of those inadvertently. We have had a couple of heavy frosts now, so it is done for the year, but we will monitor the site.
Shout out to iNaturalist for doing the job. Without that tool we would not have identified this invasive plant and it might have spread too much to deal with easily. I am glad we found it, and I am glad it is gone.
Mercury on the Move 