David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Glass House (poem)

Hunkered deep, every breath a strangled effort in January’s
icy squeeze, I duck into the greenhouse for a quick dip
into summer.  Smothered in womb-soft humidity, muscles
slacken and my defrosted mind wanders a jungled riot
of vegetable life thick with soil scents and respiring plants.

I could live forever in this indoor tropical island paradise
of rubber plants, cacao trees, lacy ferns and tendril-grasping
vines from the endless Augusts of Africa, Indonesia,
and South America.  Seduced by perpetual green, I’ve
fallen for the alluring lips of glossy, crayon colored orchids.

Thin light penetrating this crystal tent pours from sky
the color of frayed jeans.  Flimsy glazing and furnaces
gobbling fossil fuel keep this artificial world refulgent
and sotted with photosynthesis when periodic arctics press
on the panes of a fragile fallacy.

I know about people living in glass houses, an evaporating
ozone layer, countless cars idling at stoplights and my
doctor’s melanoma warnings.  A lingering adolescence
looks for a rock: “break glass in emergency,” school alarms
once instructed. Then I remember the cobwebby blue orb
captured in Apollo 8’s earthrise and imagine
the greenhouse floating in space.

Beautiful Weather Disaster

With abundant sunshine and temperatures twenty and more degrees above normal the past three days, there was no conversation in southern New England that did not begin with a swoon of delight over weather that caused many people to shed their coats and find a pair of shorts.  The spring equinox occurred around mid day on Saturday, but the new season made its presence known the day before when the thermometer hit 73, besting a record set in 1927 by six degrees.

Today’s Hartford Courant called it “a nearly perfect spring weekend,” and based on the chatter in offices, at the supermarket or over the backyard fence it seems the paper might have hit on the one item lacking controversy in these contentious times.  But even the early arrival of what might be humanity’s most anticipated moment of the year has its downside.

The annual flow of maple sap in these parts has dried up and no steam rises from area sugarhouses.  The inviting weather that’s eased heating bills, caused crocuses to pop and drew thousands to local hiking and biking trails has been the death knell for a dismal maple sugaring season.  Sap requires the regular contrast between freezing nights and days in the mid forties to maximize flow.  This season started too cold in early February and then stayed too warm at night for much of March.  Up north conditions may be different, but in Connecticut it’s time to pull the taps, clean up, and dream about next year which sugar makers, as native optimists, always figure is bound to be better.

Weather is fickle, but so are people.  Good weather has more to do with the observer than temperature, clouds, or wind.

Nature's Casino

Migrating birds and budding plants are sure markers of the season’s progress, but in New England maple sugar makers are the true heralds of spring.  When metal sap buckets are hung on roadside trees, blue plastic tubing is connected in the woods, and steam rises from sugarhouses there is no doubt the planet is tilting on its axis and longer days and warmer temperatures are on the way.

Regardless of whether they’ve ever pulled the lever on a slot machine or purchased a lottery ticket, sugar makers are big gamblers.  For many, that’s the allure of this addictive enterprise that turns maple sap into syrup merely by concentrating the natural sugar found in the tree’s juice, mostly by boiling.  But the weather this time of year is a crap shoot and sugar makers depend on below freezing temperatures at night and above freezing temperatures during the day, preferably with sunshine, to make the sap flow.  Every sugaring season is a gamble, and when Mother Nature runs the casino you’re at the mercy of a very fickle house.

Sugar makers are not only harbingers of the season; they are touchstones for the flux and reflux of the year, the tug-of-war between cold and warmth, the slight variations that produce snow, sleet, or rain.  Meteorologists be damned, there is no better barometer for change in the weather than a maple producer.  Trees in the sugar orchard are the finest instruments to measure a season’s progress.

For sugaring purposes, forecasts generated at distant reporting stations that typically make their way into the media matter little because sap flow on any given day depends not only on some generalized temperature, but on slight differences in a sugarbush’s latitude and elevation, the direction of the slope the trees grow on, whether they stand in the open at roadside, at the edge of a swamp, or deep in the woods.  No one is more sensitive to the coming of spring than the person tapped into maples.

Skunk Cabbage Energy

My boots are caked with mud and my back aches from bending on uneven, squishy ground, but I’m energized.  At last, I’m infected with spring fever.

In a narrow, crooked swale paralleling a utility right-of-way near the Farmington River, leathery cowls of skunk cabbage have pushed their way through the muck.  Neither skunk nor cabbage, this common but little noticed plant herald’s spring.  Long before calendars proclaim the equinox, it’s testing the warmth of the soil and strength of the sun.  Peeper frogs are still frozen in the mire and the traditional harbinger robin malingers all winter in Connecticut while the skunk cabbage quietly braves the season.

Lacking a showy flower, growing in soils the consistency of gumbo and emitting an offensive odor from the large glossy green leaves that will emerge in a few weeks, the skunk cabbage has a bad press and gets little springtime glory.  But the fleshy, hood-like spathes rising among snow patches and last autumn’s desiccated leaves in shades of purple, mahogany, yellow and green are the plant’s redemption.  Mottled and patterned in unpredictable swirls and stripes, intense focus on their irregular coloring can induce hypnosis.

Despite the plant’s odorous reputation and preference for muddy real estate, I find a visit is well rewarded not only for a glimpse of fleeting beauty, but for the medicinal effect that seeing the earliest and surest sign of spring will have on a winter weary soul. 

Rorschach Snow

With teeter-totter temperatures and the sun’s steepening late winter angle, the skin of snow that’s been covering the ground most of the season is rapidly burning away.  Retreating like miniature glaciers, snow patches face a liquid oblivion, soaking into half frozen ground and running down pavement until finding a catch basin or leaking into a wetland at the road’s edge.

I admit watching snow melt is a bit strange and not the most exciting preoccupation, but it’s not like I’m fixated on it for any length of time or taking precision measurements.  I’m merely focusing the usual casual glance while running an errand to the post office or grocery, filling my bird feeder or walking down the street for a coffee at LaSalle Market.  Call it an offhand way of practicing mindfulness if you need a justification, but there’s an untapped beauty in this ever-changing and quickly disappearing form of natural performance art that we see year-in-and-year-out, but rarely look at.

Maybe the receding snow illustrates something about the micro climate of our neighborhoods that is otherwise invisible.  Contrasting with the faded brown and dun-colored bare ground, we’re left with a visually discontinuous and disjoint landscape that boggles the eyes with a peculiar allure.

Except for the north sides of buildings and hills where storm remains lie thickest and last longest, thinning snow patches decorate the ground in unusual curves and linear patterns, amoeba shapes and geometric oddities.  These are nature’s white Rorschach blots, fingerprints of sunlight and wind showing where gusts piled snow and the warm light of day has penetrated to melt it.  Soon only the massive mounds left by plows and payloaders in parking lots will remind us of winter, and spring will cure us of any crazy fascination we have with melting snow.