We’re currently also in the second half of sugaring season, when the syrup grows darker – to optimists, more flavorful and less expensive; to producers, less salable, except for less.

This is also New England's notorious fifth season – mud season, of which more in a moment. The dog and I track enough into the back hall that within two days we’ve built a small beach. The problem won’t go away until the frozen ground, a foot or so down, thaws and lets all that surface water begin to percolate farther into the ground.

Here’s where the ambivalence crops up. While wishing desperately for the mud to dry out and the driveway to lose its alignment–challenging ruts, we understand that hard on its heels come the black flies, rising in their millions from the rocky stream beds all around us and appearing, on a sunny afternoon in early May, silently and ominously, before our eyes. We begin to look anxiously about us for the fluttering wings of phoebes and bats, which in recent years, sadly, have responded to an almost catastrophic drop in flying insect life by nesting and roosting elsewhere.

Working in the yard, some folks don insect nets to prevent the distraction and the bites; tough cookies eschew them, and instead wave their arms about their heads every few seconds. Talking with an elderly Inuk in Baker Lake, Canada, a friend of mine noticed his constant waving and with blinding insensitivity said, “I thought you folks didn't mind the flies.”

“Are you kidding me?” the old fellow said. “If you were to go to Niagara Falls in the middle of winter and see some guy coming down the street waving his arms like this, you'd know he was from Baker Lake.”

The flies tend to diminish in intensity about the time another scourge appears – the mosquito. We begin looking forward to late July and August, when they’ll also be less bothersome. But have we forgotten what global–warming midsummer has become? Last August, sweltering my way into sleep with a bath towel beneath me and the ceiling fan spinning above me, how I yearned for the cooler temperatures of September. But they didn’t happen. Then, suddenly, it was fall, and the roads were clogged with leaf-peepers driving fifteen miles an hour and stopping in the road to shoot photos. On the heels of that irritation, the dooryard froze, snow came, and I had to keep a pair of creepers at either end of my trip to and from the garage. But the skiers were happy.

Robert Frost's line, “I don't know where it's likely to go better,” often resonates with me this time of year, mostly because, looking ahead, I agree with him. The newspaper puts on the front page a photo of a Honda Accord doors–deep in mud (I check to see if it has a Vermont plate); splitting wood, we find we have to shift our feet every few seconds to avoid sinking ankle–deep and helpless only feet away from solid ground; and we’re faced with the reality that all-wheel drive means only that if we do get stuck, it’ll be in a far worse spot than with only two wheels driving. Old Elmer Dana of Etna, New Hampshire, who’d rescued many a helpless vehicle with his team of horses, observed that four-wheel drive was fine, but you had to have all four feet on the ground.

I still feel sad very sad, no matter how equably I accept the insults of mud season, for the perfectly good white cat we lost once. I saw him eyeing the yard from the front door, wanting to cross to the woods, and warned him firmly, “Don't try it!” Next time I looked, he was gone. I prodded all around the dooryard with my cane, but struck nothing for at least a foot down. He was a pretty good mouser, too. But we never saw him again.