I was reminded recently of the weather extremes I have experienced in the woods in the last year. I recall last April walking thru a remote pine barren and it was so hot and dry the scent in the air and the sensation underfoot was otherworldly.  The ground crackled with each step. I doubt even an expert tracker could have walked in his usual silence. I do like to try to traverse the woods as quietly as possible and in short spurts as to perhaps spy on some game I've not seen for some time. That particular day last April I'm sure my presence was more akin to a moose crashing along his path.

Two weeks later it had been raining for three days straight, but I wanted to return to the same area to do some work. The skies cleared a bit so I headed out. Of course after I had ventured far into the woods the skies reopened. Swamps overflowed and other scents filled the air. One scent I caught reminded me of a bog I had visited long ago. It is a delight when a scent touches some part of your memory and brings back images and thoughts long forgotten. It was a blueberry bog I remembered. I had visited it with my parents over forty years ago. Though it wasn't close by I instantly remembered its location and details of the visit.

Other trips in the following days brought me by old springs and areas of former freshets that were long dry...but the rains had replenished them and they stayed that way until midsummer. Our summer lingered well into fall and fall into winter.

Finally the cold hit and with a vengeance. I was standing this past week in silence in an area well known to me, shivering,  when I was sure I heard the faint babbling of a brook, of water slipping over rocks. I thought back to standing silently on the first day of the past summer in a different woods and hearing water where I hadn't before, under my feet an underwater spring emerging near a site of the Great Hare after a rain. It was a moment I will not forget. But now what was this?  Water running on a sub zero morning? I turned to look and smiled. A gentle winter breeze was blowing thru the small frozen leaves of a mountain laurel. The dozens of dormant evergreen leaves were ever so slightly rubbing against each other, touching and  imitating the sound of a summer stream, or perhaps longing for it just as I was. That's how cold it was.