Blanche Lamore, of Cabot, was honored at yesterday's town meeting for her many years of service as Justice of the Peace. I'm told she will be on WCAX's "Super Seniors" segment during the evening news (6 p.m.) on Friday, March 9. I'm sorry I wasn't at town meeting this year to get pictures of that event to post here, but I'll be watching on Friday and will try to have a link to that segment for you.

We've had real spring weather all day today. I watched the thermometer outside my office window climb to the high 60's (it was in the sun!!), but even now that the sun has slipped behind the hill, I'm still seeing a reading of 54. There are rain showers in the forecast for tomorrow afternoon. That will probably diminish all this nice snow we finally got - but it won't take away all of it here.

We were visited by a flock of cedar waxwings this afternoon. They are such a pretty bird. They love our crab apples left over from summer.

The sugar makers must have been busy keeping up with the sap run today. We've heard that this has already been a pretty good year for making maple syrup, and if the season lasts through the next couple of weeks, they should have a very profitable year.

Perhaps you noticed the new header on the blog. I took a few minutes today to put some old black and white snapshots together of our sugaring operation many years ago. I wasn't around then, but a few years later I was, and not much had changed. We always sugared with horses, used wooden buckets that had to be painted with a special aluminum paint on the inside and dull red paint on the outside. We had tin covers, but we never used metal buckets. And always used Foster spouts, as far as I know. They were invented by a neighbor, A. M. Foster, who lived where the Burtt apple farm is now. Our sugar woods was behind where John "Woody" Woods lives, and the sugar house was in a field that actually belonged to the Petit farm. It was a long haul out of the woods and over the Plain to the home farm, and it was hard sometimes to navigate the mud, even with a team of horses. I sometimes got to ride one of the horses out of the woods, and even though it was a big, broad draft horse and there was no saddle, just lots of straps, I would never pass up a chance to ride.

I mostly didn't need reins - the horse knew the way home and was usually eager to get there and be fed, but if there was any grass showing at all along the roadsides, sometimes the horse would want to stop for a nibble, and then I had to prod her along. Sometimes I led the second horse, or sometimes there was another rider. Most often, we took the team home with the sled, like in the picture, and everyone would pile on and ride. That worked as long as there was snow on the road, but when mud season took over the roads, we had to leave the sled in the woods and either ride the horses or walk home - at least two miles. I loved being part of sugaring season.

Yesterday afternoon when we went to Cabot Village, we took some pictures. I'm afraid I tinkered with them to reduce the size and that made them not very sharp. I need to work on that. Here is the slide show, such as it is: Cabot, March 6, 2012

No sugaring operations visible yesterday, but I bet they were boiling at Burtt's and other places in town today.