Spring in Brown County
~ by Mark Blackwell
Ah, spring. Spring is a reason for the oppressive baggage of winter to be lifted, and along with it, our spirits. Spring inspires hope— hope that there will be more days above freezing, hope that the snows will start to abate, hope that the floods won’ t be too bad this year. Spring also inspires optimism. More than a few Brown Countians maintain their own weather stations. They pore over the Old Farmer Almanac checking and double checking the planting tables— all of that effort just so they won’ t be a day late getting their gardens out. There is that tradition of getting a groundhog to predict the onset of spring but I don’ t really count on spring until I see the first garden get planted.
Another surefire way to tell that spring has hit the county is daffodils. Daffodils are prolific and brave. They will shove aside inches of old snow in order to get their share of sunshine.
I have found that there are two kinds of daffodils. There are domesticated daffodils in just about everybody’ s flower beds and there are also the wild ones, the ones who had no choice but to take care of themselves. You find the wild ones out in the woods.
Hiking the unofficial trails in Yellowwood State Forest you often come around a bend and— there they are. Sometimes they seem to be comfortably acclimated to an old, forgotten flower bed. In other spots they spread out in amazing profusion. These are the remnants of early family homesteads.
They are a floral evidence of folks, long-gone, who tried to make a life in some pretty unforgiving soil and terrain. These spots are like pioneer shrines. I always feel obligated to find the corner stones of the cabin and try to imagine what the place must have looked like a hundred years ago.
I like to visit an old cemetery, back in the woods, where a Civil War veteran is buried. In the spring his grave is covered with a blanket of gold. It causes me to wonder who planted the Daffodils and how long ago. And when was the last time a family member visited. That’ s one of the special things about Brown County— we haven’ t let the past get to far away from us.
Back to spring. Spring, here in the county can be pretty two-faced. With the warmer days the snow melts but then all of the detritus that you didn’ t get around to picking up last fall now lies exposed. With the warmer days come the April showers, and whether or not they bring the flowers that bloom in May, they bring the blooming mud in the here and now. I am always amazed that a place with as thin a top soil as we have can also have mud as deep as we do.
When I was a kid, I was very impressed with Tarzan movies. One of the things that impressed me the most was quicksand. In every movie it seemed like somebody fell in the quicksand and got sucked under, to a gruesome death. I paid attention and I gave quicksand the respect I thought it deserved. However, quicksand don’ t hold a candle to the right patch of Brown County mud.
Mud season( which is a sub-season of spring) is truly something to behold. Brown County mud is something original. It is slick and sticky and may even have electro-static properties. I have to wear suspenders on my muck boots just so the mud doesn’ t suck them right off my feet.
Depending on where Easter and the last snow coincide on the calendar, instead of hiding eggs, some families just send the kids out to find the hand tools and such that got left out before winter and the parents pay the kids a quarter
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42 Our Brown County • March / April 2019