It turns out that under all that snow, ice and misery, there's solid ground. It has been so long since snowlessness that, until this week, ground was just part of the lakes oral history. Stories passed down from generation to generation spoke of hatless peoples walking the shores without boots and something called a lawn. So much time has passed that it was hard to separate myth from reality. It turns out that solid ground is real.

Rain, another item mentioned in some of the older oral history stories, was also rediscovered this week. For those of you that may have forgotten, rain is a type of snow in liquid form. And you don't have to shovel it.

The warming weather coaxed local maple trees to run one drop at a time.

The drops were collected daily.

And transported to the sap shack.

Once there, the drops were boiled down, filtered (seen here), and bottled.

On Sunday, there was 22.5 inches of ice covering the lake but Summer feels closer. Closer. Swimming, rafto, tanning on the dock, golf, and summer in general all felt closer this week. Not closer in a cold numbers on a calender sort of way, but rather in a bird song, sun on the face, water flowing from creeks into the lake sort of way. This is also a critical time for the lake level to get closer to normal. With much of the ground frozen, almost all the rain on the watershed flows into the lake. Let's hope for wet weather as we get closer to May.

-Nemo, keeper of some of the non-Winter oral histories                                                                                                     Previous   Next