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Clean out the bluebird houses. Put up the grow lights for Honey's vegetable and flower seedlings. Plow the garden. Open the windows in the barn so the barn swallows can get in to nest.
There's a lot to do in the early spring, but those are chores I do with a smile. Which early spring chores, you may ask, do I not like to do? Let's see, let's see . . .
General Doc, my brother-in-law, asked me to put the pole with the purple martin houses back up. It fell over. I may have hit it with the tractor.
I'd be happy about putting it back up if I had any confidence that martins would use it. It's been 10 years, maybe 15, since Doc had the bright idea to put up martin houses, sure that they would come, and they never have, at least not to nest. Bank swallows tried out the white plastic imitation gourd nests one year. House sparrows are the only bird that will nest in them, and they're a pest.
Honey recalled the elaborate martin houses maintained by Charlie Dobrin, her next-door neighbor, when she was a kid in Weirton. Five or six poles in his back yard each held up a large purple martin condominium complex.
Charlie Dobrin worked in the steel mill at Weirton. He would sit on his back stoop for hours, watching his martins.
"A martin would fly by and Charlie would say, 'That one's going in No. 6,' and it would," she said. "There had to be a hundred of them. How he could tell them apart I don't know, but he did."
If martins by some miracle did come and nest in our low-rent plastic gourds, I can guarantee Doc's not going to sit in the pasture for hours and watch them. Maybe they know that, and that's why they don't come.
Cleaning leaves and sticks out the old stone watering trough is a happy spring chore. The trough dates from 1856 according to family history. That's where my granddad watered Dot and Maude, his draft horses.
Cut from a long rectangle of sandstone, it is perennially covered with wet green moss. Water flows into it from a pipe coming from an enclosed basin in the hillside. A tin dipper for drinking always hung on a big white oak nearby.
When our children were small, my mother, Ol' Food, loved to take them down the path to fill clean milk jugs with spring water. In another month there will be trillium, bloodroot, violets, Solomon's seal, Dutchman's breeches and other wildflowers along the path. We always looked for light-shy camel crickets and slippery salamanders when we moved the board gate protecting the spring's source.
Trimming the blueberry bushes is a task that can be done in the fall, but I usually wait until spring. I cut back some of the older branches, and lop off growth up through the chicken wire "roof" I have stretched over top, part of my scheme to keep out thieving birds. I don't begrudge the few berries the catbird will sneak in and take, but I'll be darned if a flock of blackbirds is going to pick my bushes clean. The catbird will scold us when we pick "her" berries in July.
I enjoy cutting and splitting firewood any time of year, but getting in our store of wood for next winter is best done now, so the wood can season, and before the garden and lawn demand my time. In summertime the woods will be hot and full of itchy sawgrass and biting deer flies and mosquitoes. Right now the woods are fresh and clean from winter. The soft forest soil, topped by a thick bed of leaves that are dry on top, is just right for taking a little rest, time to lay back and savor the crisp air, gazing up through the still-bare branches, watching clouds hurry across a robin's egg blue sky.
There are a lot of chores to be done in early spring, and most are happy chores because, if nothing else, it means we are done with winter.
The garden seeds are started, the barn windows are open, the garden's plowed, and It's still a little chilly for bare arms to be fishing leaves out of the watering trough, so today, I guess, is my date with a purple martin house pole.
(Fred Miller's third book of stories, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." is $10 and available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, Connie's Corner Restaurant and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)