The Old Farmer's Almanac Farmers Calendar

Our town has only 1,500 full-time residents, but it boasts five churches, in part because we used to have a considerable number of “summer people.” Most come for the quiet, the mountain, and the historic Lake Club.

It’s hard to say how many summer people there are now. You can keep a rough tally by counting the number of tanned, fit ladies in tennis dresses in the General Store.

Two of our five churches are relics of the summer people. Now a private home, the former Our Lady of the Snows was built for the mostly Irish, mostly Catholic servants who cooked and cleaned for the summer people.

There’s also Emmanuel Church, open only in the summer. A friend who belonged to a subcategory called “winter summer people”—those who eventually settled here year-round—used to call it “the Lake Club at prayer.”

Winter summer people often come to the community church on Main Street. The other two churches serve a more conservative population outside the village limits.

Why so many houses of worship? Perhaps it’s because, with the center of town nearly 1,500 feet above sea

level, we’re the highest village in New England. Some of us like to think that this means we’re closer to heaven.

We’ve been visiting this shoreline for more than 40 summers, and now, for the first time, there are egrets around the offshore rocks.

Those rocks were once the exclusive province of double-crested cormorants. You can still see a few cormorants there, spreading their wings to dry,

but nowhere near as many as in the past.

This little piece of waterfront also used to be the haunt of long-established families who came back

every summer to relax and play with their cousins in the other houses. There were softball games and Sunday evening hymn sings.

That’s changing, too. As children and grandchildren multiply, it’s harder to share the old houses and pay the steep property taxes. So old families cash in and sell the Victorian-era “cottages” to high-tech millionaires, some of whom immediately tear them down and build new palaces on the beach. It’s a succession as natural as that of the birds.

But something is lost. There are fewer softball games, and when it’s time to haul the big swimming raft in or out of the bay, there are fewer strong young bodies to do the hard work. And the Sunday evening hymn sings are disappearing, like the cormorants.

A rainy spring speaks with many voices. Dripping gutters plink like banjos. Sleet makes a ticking sound on the windows. A hard rain, the kind folks call a “gullywasher” or a “frog-strangler,” is so loud that you might have to shout to be heard over it, even without thunder. But a soft rain, the kind that’s slow and steady and good for the garden, murmurs like a lullaby.

On average, an inch of rain that falls evenly on 1 acre drops about 113 tons of water—more than 27,000 gallons. Add it all up, and that’s enough, in an average year, to cover the 48 contiguous states with 30 inches of water, if it stood still.

But it doesn’t. In North America, 70 percent of this water goes back into the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration. The remainder seeps underground or runs downhill into waterways, creating an average stream flow of 1,200 billion gallons per day.

Those are the other voices, from the whisper of a tiny rivulet that you have to bend over to hear to the whitewater roar of a river bursting over its banks. Where we live, on the eastern flank of a mountain, the streams are the first thing we hear when we wake up after a rainy night—not a single melody, but an oratorio.

I remember the May when I found the clean, dry, elegantly curved skull of a small deer in the woods. 

It had been a hard winter for deer. The snow came early and piled deep. No thaw in January, February, March; even April was grim and gray. The smaller critters were safe and warm under the snow, but it was near impossible for deer to move. It made them easy prey for coyotes and for dogs whose owners allow them to run loose in the winter.

Wildlife experts know that hard winters kill more deer. It’s natural. It’s expected. It goes into the state’s calculation of how many deer should be harvested this fall to best maintain the health of the herd. Authorities estimate that there will be about 15 percent fewer deer, so they will plan the hunting season accordingly.

I put the skull in a plastic bag and set it aside to give to my grandson, Sam, who is curious about nature and not squeamish about bones. To him, it will be a mystery to investigate and perhaps a step down the long path that leads to becoming a scientist. To me, it is a memento mori, a Latin phrase that means “remember you must die.”

A harbinger of spring around here is a wildflower called red trillium (Trillium erectum). Ages ago, people called it wake-robin, because it appears just as the first robins arrive in spring.

It’s an elegant plant, whose single flower has three maroon-red petals that droop toward the ground, making it hard to spot from above. It grows in most of the eastern states and provinces, some of which have given it protected status, so check before you attempt to transplant it.

The color mimics the appearance of rotting meat, as does its gamy scent. Called “stinking Benjamin,” the plant attracts carrion flies, insects that normally lay their eggs in rotting meat, which pollinate the flowers. Once again, fair is foul and foul is fair.

But why “Benjamin”? It turns out to be a corruption of the word “benzoin,” or “benjoin,” a substance found in Southeast Asia and used in the manufacture of perfumes. Another evocative name for the plant is “wet dog trillium.” It’s not a strong odor; rather a faint whiff of eau de dump. The trick is to keep your nose at a safe distance. That way, stinking Benjamin can be one of the fairest flowers of the spring.

8:00 a.m.: Town Meeting won’t start for an hour, but my wife May has to open the elementary school (she’s the principal). As Town Moderator, I need to ensure that the wooden ballot boxes have been brought down from the town hall, which is too small for this meeting. The sky is blue and the sun is bright. I leave my topcoat at home.

1:00 p.m.: Meeting’s over. Some folks got agitated about a $350,000 bond issue for the new fire truck, and a long-winded presentation on traffic calming didn’t improve anyone’s mood. Nor did going outside, where it’s snowing hard. I miss my topcoat.

2:00 p.m.: Lunch and a springlike shift in the weather cheers us up. We take the dogs for a walk, wearing light jackets and dark glasses (us, not the dogs).

4:00 p.m.: Time to set up the St. Patrick’s Day supper at church. As we put up the folding tables and chairs, the south wind backs into the northwest and the temperature drops abruptly. People arrive in the steaming vestry wearing epaulets of snow.

8:00 p.m.: Stuffed with corned beef, onions, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and bread pudding, we shuffle out

of church. In a clear sky, the Full Worm Moon hangs benevolently, unperturbed by all of these vernal reversals.

The dogs and I walked south today in bright sun, with the mercury rising to 35°F. But the spectacle of two pileated woodpeckers whirling around a grove of beeches turned our winter ramble into a Mardi Gras parade.

Bigger than other woodpeckers, these exotic creatures boast brilliant plumage of black and white as formal as tuxedos, with a blood-red crest on their heads. Unlike the machine-gun rattles of downy and hairy woodpeckers or the syncopated beat of yellow-bellied sapsuckers, the sound that the pileated species makes while excavating large holes in trees is a slow, percussive “Thock! Thock! Thock!”

This krewe of two chased each other around the pearl-gray trunks, occasionally hovering in midair, beak to beak, wings flashing and heads bobbing. Were they fighting or flirting? Males and females are about the same size, with equally vivid colors, so it was hard to tell.

Their battle—or dance—took my breath away. The dogs stood perfectly still and watched the birds with close attention, rare for them.

Then, suddenly, as if they’d noticed us staring, the birds disappeared into the darker hemlocks that lay just beyond the beeches. The parade was over.

My plow guy lives up the street. Over a cup of coffee in his kitchen, he talked about his work. It’s tough on family life. “The hardest are the 24-hour storms, when you’re up all night, and then your kid wants to play as soon as you get home.”

On the other hand, he says, nature’s beauty is on show. “I see the glowing green eyes of enormous owls. The first time I saw a bobcat was when I was plowing snow.”

My plow guy describes his clients as “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” The good (95 percent) pay on time and park their cars out of his way on snowy nights. One brings him hot coffee and muffins on the job.

The bad are slow to pay and quick to complain: “Why do you always come at 2:00 in the morning? Do you have to use those blinking lights?”

The ugly have steep, twisty driveways, “and once you start sliding back- ward, you’re stuck—any plow guy who says he never gets stuck is a liar.”

Plow guys help each other out whenever possible—it’s the Code of the Plow—but there are limits. After pulling Plow Guy out a few times, one of his competitors handed him a set of chains and said, “Good luck.”

This, too, is the Code of the Plow.

Will Bananas Help Save the Little Brown Bat?

In the July twilight, bats flicker between trees, zigging and zagging in a relentless pursuit of mosquitoes. A single Little Brown Bat can eat 1,000 mosquitoes per hour—the equivalent of an average man eating eight large pizzas in the same period.

The Little Browns have had a tough time recently, due to a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, first discovered in New York State in 2006. Bats were dying by the millions in the caves where they hibernate over winter. The diseased bats had a white fungus on their noses.

Scientists identified the fungus as Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which also happens to be found on bananas. Fruit growers had learned that it could be controlled with a common bacterium called Rhodococcus rhodochrous. A grad student studying white-nose syndrome at Georgia State University wondered if R. rhodochrous might work on bats as well as bananas.

The test results are promising, and in May 2015, 75 previously infected bats were released in the Mark Twain Cave Complex in Hannibal, Missouri.

With luck—and a little help from bananas—we may enjoy many more violet twilights watching bats skitter across the sky.

The Houses With the Best Views Are Empty in December

Temperatures falling, skies threatening, the dogs and I started our afternoon walk a little before 3:00, heading uphill. The plan was to follow the road all the way to the top.

It climbs sharply at the end, and the prospect is magnificent there. In addition to a broad view of the Wapack Range and a few buildings in Peterborough, there was light glinting off the waters of Thorndike Pond and steam rising from the match factory in Jaffrey.

By 4:00, we were in a field just beyond the last two houses on the road—summer places, to judge from the absence of cars and the window shades pulled down. Not surprising, really; the winter heating bills must be as spectacular as the view. Generally speaking, in this town the houses with the best views are unoccupied in December.

When we started home, we flushed a massive buck that bounded farther up the wooded hill, headed north. The dogs didn’t see him—their vision is surprisingly poor—but they got wildly excited when they caught his scent at the point where he began his flight and started to tug frantically on their leashes. The dogs wanted to follow him into the forest.

So did I, but it was getting dark. There will be other opportunities to track deer when the light comes back.