March 2

March is the unofficial beginning of frost heave season here in Paxton. Our own road has stared to buckle noticeably along a crack in the bed that runs down the middle, beginning just after the farm driveway and extending down intermittently to our front.

The town roads are littered with these temporal ridges and potholes, as the warming days and yet still cold nights expand and contract the moisture beneath. Our car rides like an old jalopy, bouncing along as if on leaf springs whose time has long passed.

This expansion of the soil is a powerful force, and we wonder at the way it shapes the landscape. The farm field is evidence of this enough, as the first crop of newly surfaced rocks should be ready within the month. Some are the size of an oak barrel, having moved ever so slowly year after year through freeze and thaw until it wormed its way to the surface ready for harvest.

Soon we will hear the tractors in the field, going slowly with bucket low to the ground so that one of the men can collect them. Another sign of spring.

One large boulder had made its way to the surface of the middle of the field used last year for cabbages. I suspect that when Fred was cultivating one of the tines caught alarmingly on the rock, which precipitated his using the tractor to fully extract it. There it sat for the remainder of the fall, propped upright in between the rows of plastic that marked the beds of cabbage.

I can look out the front window and see the rock through the spruce line. Though the field is sill roughly 8” deep in snow, the boulder sits nearly 2 feet up above the surface.

Yesterday, I took the dogs for a walk though the field, just in the early morning when the cold temperatures had hardened the snowpack enough so that we could walk on top without breaking through. The dogs were particularly interested in exploring around the boulder, for it is evident that our resident deer use the rock as a marker of sorts to locate the cast off cabbage that resides below the snowpack.

Leading up to the boulder from the far fields is a trail of deer tracks. They form a jumble around the rock, evidently where the deer had stopped to hoof at the snow in search of old cabbage, some of which has been now exposed to the air. The dogs obviously enjoy the odors, both of last year’s decomposing cabbage and of the remnant passing of the deer.

For our part, when the sun warms just enough, we are patently aware of the decomposition. Old cabbage may be intriguing to the dogs, but I assure you that being downwind from this patch has its disadvantages.