At the end of my driveway, I check the traffic and cautiously cross the state highway onto the loose gravel of my rustic field road. The fields here are low and drained by large swales formed by my grandfather back in the Great Depression. My father called these fields the “rice paddies” because harvesting the hay was a cautionary tale and required astute timing to the fickle cycles of Mother Nature. The fields are good for Canary grass, not a particularly nutritious grass, but one the cows loved to chew their cuds on, and a grass that is pretty tasty, especially if spiced with a pail of molasses.

I put a couple culverts in the swales and crushed stone over the culverts and added stones culled from the upper fields to boost the old work road’s stability and I can pass by regardless of the weather and the first thing I come to is the stump of the big white ash. It was the largest ash on the hundred acres and it’s just as dead as all the rest of the ash, dead as a doornail in the coffin of a vanquished species. These trees will never return, like the American chestnut and the elms down on Elm Street. The ash was big -- two guys could barely get their arms around the ridge-bark trunk. It was dropping limbs as big around as 40-year-old trees onto the road and it was either allow it to come down piece by piece over the years or take care of it all at once and try to salvage what was left of the firewood. What a log it would have made if I had gotten on it sooner, a beautiful white, straight-grained wood, ash, suitable for furniture or cabinetry or sculpting.

The hedgerow the ash was a dominate figure in runs the southern boundary of the field and was at one time a stone wall. The stone wall has been raided over the years. As the hill forms out of the rice paddies, and we travel east, higher, the oaks take over and are mixed with shagbark hickory and black cherry. The black cherries ring both sides of the hill fields and have also suffered a natural culling. I don’t know why. Over half of them are dead. But the oaks are alive and healthy and way on the top of hill is the defining sycamore with the patchy smooth greenish and yellow bark, known to some as a buttonball tree. Certain times of the year you can see the buttonballs hanging way in the boughs like falling lollipops. The next time you watch a war movie and the troops are coming inland from D-Day and the Jeeps and personnel carriers are streaming down a long, straight, narrow highway, and it is tree-lined in perfect symmetry, those are buttonballs, a type of maple. It’s a tree our European cousins love to prune to distraction, but, here, on the farm, our sycamore has never been touched, was my father’s favorite tree (he loved the colors of the bark), and it stands free, big branched, and stretching to the sky on the highest elevation of our farm.

I stop my truck near a cut in the fencerow. There are some dead cherry trees here and some blackcaps and clumps of multiflora rose and this was the cut-through to the next field through which my brother and I slammed our old cars -- Packards and Chevys and Buicks -- back in the 60’s, taking off fenders on the cherry tree trunks and causing havoc on the way to neighbor Watie’s house. The crossing is closed now and grown in and in a sunny spot I have a hive of bees, the boxes white and yellow. This hive, last spring, was sick, had evidence of bee paralysis syndrome, and I brought it up here out of the home apiary for seclusion, treated it for mites, and added a frame of brood from a healthy hive and it thrived. The hive produced two supers of honey. A super holds ten frames of comb and might weight 40 pounds when full. I put my ear against the side of the hive and give it a tap with my fingertip.

HhhhhhUUUUUuuuuuummm! Strong. I pop the top and check the supplies. They are eating the sugar cake and munching on the pollen patty -- good enough for me to leave them a couple weeks. The queen is beginning to lay eggs in whatever proportion the population of the hive can keep warm on a cold night and the hives need sufficient protein and carbs to get through a heavy, cold, rainy spell without stressing the larvae which are fed every day for 5 to 6 days before the cells are capped and the larvae enter the pupal stage. This hive is great. Its only danger is that it does not have a black bear fence. I’m taking my chances.

Back in my Calvary Blue Tacoma, I turn across the top of the hill and stop alongside the garlic patch. To see the garlic up two to four inches and turning green in the sunshine and knowing the mulch is in place and the walkways thoroughly mulched to control weeds is as pleasing a feeling as knowing the hive is alive. Spring is here. The garlic is up, all twelve thousand, and, as soon as I get back to it, we will be planting potatoes.

I look down the hill, across the still dormant brown fields: there’s a small flock of blackbirds down there by the brook and I can see a pair of bluebirds along the north side and the wind is light and breezy.