Post Card From the Land Where Rain Means Mud

While most states have to get by with just four seasons (and Southern California, barely one-and-a-half), Vermont enjoys six: spring, summer, fall, winter, more winter and mud.

Right now, we’re in the middle of mud.

It’s a strange time of year. The thermometer is as temperamental as a jackass, and the weather fluctuates wildly between bone-chilling winds and melt-your-heart sunshine.

As I write, it’s nearly 60 degrees, yet a third of the land still lies under snow. The other two-thirds lies under mud.

Mud. Great pools of mud. Squishing, semi-permanent, tire-treaded ruts of mud. Bootsful, rugsful, housesful of brown, viscous, quick-staining, slow-drying m-u-d.

Many of our roads here in northern Vermont are still unpaved, and at the moment, most of them are all but impassable. Drivers who have safely negotiated snow, sleet, hail and ice all winter now find themselves sunk to the hubcaps in mud.

Much has been written about the smell of spring--apple blossoms, early-blooming wildflowers, gentle winds from the south. Mud season has its own smell, too. It is earthy, in every sense of the word, an aroma derived from decaying vegetable matter, rotten fish, dog droppings, melting snow and the oozing of primordial slime.

Oh, how the dog loves it! She plows her once-black nose into the deeply rutted driveway. She rolls her once-white coat in the swamp. She spends hours sniffing the ground with a pleasure that borders on obscenity. This is her first mud season. She finds it good.

This is far from my wife’s first mud season, and she does not find it good. She struggles to keep the mud outside the house. In vain, she mops and remops the kitchen floor. In exasperation, she demands that we take off our shoes at the door. In horror, she gazes at the fresh track of footprints and pawprints leading up to our daughters’ room.

Finally, in desperation, she hauls a load of ancient two-by-fours out of the shed (which is also ankle-deep in mud, thanks to a leak in its rusty roof) and lays them end-to-end from the car to the front door.

It takes less than an hour for the planks to gain a patina of muddy foot- and pawprints of their own. Soon they are caked. In a week, they’ll be indistinguishable from the surrounding morass.

In addition to the sights and smells of mud season, this time of year has its own sounds. Most noticeable is the sound of running water. Brooks, streams and rivers that have lain silent all winter under a thick quilt of snow now struggle free with a gurgle, then a roar.

In counterpoint comes the sound of the sump-pump.

The basement floor in our 150-year-old farmhouse was cemented more than a decade ago, but each mud season a spring pushes up through the concrete, first dribbling, then gushing icy water from the depths of the earth into our cellar.

A sump-pump was installed some years back to suck the water from the cellar and spew it onto the sloping field that borders the house. For the better part of five seasons--spring, summer, fall, winter and more winter--the cellar has been dry; the pump silent. Since the beginning of mud season, it has been running regularly. Last night, as I waited for sleep, I noticed that the interval between the pump’s ejaculations was down to 15 seconds.

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Even as this report on Vermont’s sixth season was flying off to Los Angeles, our village was abruptly thrown back into winter by an April snowfall. Deep down where mud begins, the earth continued to thaw. Now we have slush again, this time brown.

But the birds are back. There is hope of seeing green once more.