There’s a new minor “tourist attraction” here in Vermont and it’s right across the road from my stone schoolhouse in the form of a felled pine forest.

Back in early December, a Sunday night snowstorm turned to ice and at about 5 am, the quiet was pierced by the cracking sound of trees breaking and plummeting to the earth from the weight of the snow and heavy ice. The sound continued until about 10 am when the center of the pine stand was decimated. The pines needed thinning, and their tops could not stand the wintry burden, so they broke off, usually about halfway up the tree. Others fell over, only to get hung up on their neighboring trees.

 The stand of southern pine was planted by Treverton Ketcham, a lifelong area resident, who enjoyed working in the woods. About ten years after he returned from WW II service, he planted the whole hillside in neat rows, and they became a stately stand of pines. They were beautiful and Mr Ketcham says he always heard the oxygen is better around pines. “It seems like when you work out in the pine woods, you feel better,” he commented. I do know they smelled beautiful as a result of the tree breaks.

Since that sad day, when I watched helplessly as pines kept toppling, people have stopped to see the altered landscape. They knock on my door to ask what caused the destruction, assuming it must have been a tornado touchdown. One group took pictures of each other standing in front of the devastation; last Saturday, a couple of men who pulled off onto the road’s muddy shoulder to gawk, were reminded of mud season in Vermont. They buried their minivan in the mud right up to the tops of the right side wheels and had to use my telephone to call a tow truck.

Mr Ketcham tells me he and his son will try to salvage what they can from the downed trees; his son would like to build a small shed with pieces too short to be sold. “Maybe a few of the trees will go into somebody’s log cabin,” he remarked to me.

Trees are an essential part of our lives here and everyone is watching the sugar maples to see if they’re starting to bud out, which signals the end of maple syrup season. The warm spell last week was not good for what we had hoped would be a long season but a cold wave this week may prompt another sap run. A few sugar makers have already stopped making syrup in southern Vermont.

I’ve enjoyed two great bird sightings on my property in the past week. One was a turkey who strolled out of the woods and crossed the road with that herky-jerky neck motion, and the other was a woodcock near a little spring on the other side of the property. I surprised it when I was checking the spring and it surprised me when it took off under my nose.

I thought a stanza from Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” written in 1936, pretty much summed up the time of year we are in:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

(This week’s column was written by Laurie Loveland of Sudbury, Vermont, who is the daughter of Jean Loveland, the regular writer of this column. Mrs Loveland is ill.)