growing (and not)

Last Friday marked the one year anniversary of us driving away from New York and starting a new life in Vermont. It passed without much fanfare. When I mentioned it to Will he said "is that all? Just a year?" Which pretty much sums up how we all feel. I remember that I couldn't get enough of the green in the first weeks. Mosses and leaves and grass and the slime on river rocks, after the grey concrete landscape of the city I drank in the green every chance I got. I'm still a little like that. A long winter, plus a general love of green growing things means I spend a fair amount of time taking photographs of leaves and trees and moss (moss is pretty cool, after all).

When we first moved into the house I was dead set against cutting down even a single tree. "we have two ACRES of trees!" Will would say. "No. No cutting." He trimmed a little, cut a few down while I wasn't looking, thinned here and there, but it's been an ongoing stalemate.

Until I started my garden. And now I'm feeling a little ruthless about the trees. They are blocking the sunlight for most of the day. My tomatoes are looking sad and spindly, the onions are creeping instead of bounding. Although the lettuce seems to enjoy it. And the bees are so happy that they've filled their first super (time to get a third I guess. And maybe a fourth if they keep it up at this rate). I still love the trees. He is not allowed to take anything down that is a sugar maple or a birch. The sugar maples because, well, I like making syrup, the more the merrier. And the birches because I love them too much. For now. But we're going to have to do some (supervised by an experienced friend, of course) lumberjacking.

Last year we were (sort of) New Yorkers. Now we're lumberjacks.

Probably not that surprising.