The most wonderful weather day of the year so far

Spring is here even though there are still 2 feet of snow on the ground, more in the places it drifted all winter. The most familiar harbinger of spring - friends and neighbors asking if you want to buy syrup - is heard with increasing frequency. All along the ridges of the mountains, smoke and steam are rising from the chimneys of sugar houses. Someday I'm going to venture into a sugar house while they are boiling sap and boil up an egg. In the old days it was common to hard cook an egg and some hot dogs in the boiling sap for dinner when sap was running. People who don't have sugar bush to tap, have spouts and buckets on the big old maple trees that line the roads and driveways. That's the thing about Vermont, an efficient simplicity.

I noticed that the old apple tree up by my horse's run-in has the beginnings of buds, something new this week. Tomorrow I am going to prune off the suckers and put them in a vase for forcing. In a couple of weeks they'll bloom.

Even with all of this beauty and sunshine today I still couldn't stop thinking about Terry Shiavo (and I hardly watched the news all day). The subject was on the lips of just about everyone I spoke with, too. There has only been one person I talked to that got really mad when I brought it up. Zero to sixty in 1 second kind of mad. She's a good friend of mine, so I took it in stride, but it struck me as odd because she's all involved in the "Peace Movement", is really anti-war, yes, and a Democrat, but I wouldn't have thought that she would have gone off the way she did about the politics of the Shiavo case. Every time some one gets killed in Iraq she counts it as almost a personal loss. Go figure.

It's way past politics now, though I should think that heads are going to roll after it is all over. However it ends. I know I'll be voting differently next time around.

You've got to give it all to Jeb Bush. He's a stand up kind of guy. Maybe he should run for President.

Hen