FEBRUARY

THE SECOND MONTH • 2021 FEBRUARY HATH 28 DAYS

Have you heard the snowdrops ringing / Their bells to themselves? Smaller and whiter than the singing / Of any fairy elves. –Sydney Thompson Dobell

Q: Why did the doughnut visit the dentist? A: He needed a chocolate filling.

Farmer's Calendar

February 28. The end of the last fully winter month. I got in the car and headed northwest to Burlington, by the long way: say 150 miles. A journey to the edge.

My side of Vermont is a close country, narrow, wooded, but west of the mountains you get into a country of broad valleys, real farmland, with flat, wide fields and blue silos. I stopped to buy a doughnut in Whiting, a little village built up on top of a hill with plowed fields spreading down and away in all directions. Pretty weather—cold, though. The lakes and ponds still frozen hard. From Whiting you can look west and see, for the first time, the Adirondacks, blue and gray in the distance; I ate my doughnut and admired them, not without misgivings. Somewhere between here and those peaks is a borderline. Over this is not New England. Beyond the Adirondacks there is an enormous country, a continent, a nation, and from this little hilltop it all seems at the same time very far off and very near, almost as though you could walk over to those mountains, climb up, and look out over the whole republic spread before you: the Great Lakes, the Plains, the Rockies, and the Golden Gate.

Listen to the Farmer's Calendar at Almanac.com/Podcast.