I cut a tree for Christmas yesterday, on a morning so cold and crisp it stung my nostrils to breathe. It was me and my furry mutt Paco out in the snow, walking around behind the barn of a tree farm on the road to Monroe, like a print right out of Currier and Ives.

I chose a blue balsam fir eight feet tall, nicely tapered, full and symmetrical. My new Stihl chainsaw refused to stay running, gasping and quitting whenever I pulled on the trigger. Fortunately I'd brought one of the bowsaws they'd provided, and a few strokes of the freshly sharpened blade dropped the fir into the snow. Another lesson in appropriate technology. I coaxed Paco into the front seat of my old Subaru wagon, lowered the rear seats and stuffed it in trunk first. Then I drove sround to the house, took my checkbook out of the glove box and went inide to pay.

The owners were a picture-perfect old Maine couple right out of Central Casting: white-haired, cheery and loquacious. They were sitting by their old woodburning Clarion cookstove with a steaming kettle on it, in a kitchen that must have been eighty degrees.

As I wrote out the check, I complimented them on the quality of their trees. It takes a lot of work to grow good Christmas trees, with many hours of seasonal tending and pruning. I told them about last December, when I'd brought home a handsome golden-green spruce that reeked like cat piss as soon as I got it through the door, so much so that my wife threw it out into the snow after only fifteen minutes. It never even made it into the tree stand.

"Oh no, deah!" the old lady chuckled. "That was a cat spruce. You don't bring them in the house!"

Lynn picked a deer tick off me yesterday, a tiny dark one the size of a pinprick in the corner of my eye. I didn't even notice it. I spend a lot less time in front of a mirror than I used to, since it's become so much less rewarding, watching the wrinkles, sags, bags and blotches advance. The person I see staring back is my father.

It wasn't engorged so it apparently hadn't had time to drink. If you send it away to the state lab, they'll identify it for you, but they can't tell if it's carrying Lyme. So there's nothing to do but keep an eye on the wound, such as it is, for signs of the telltale bullseye rash. God, that's just what I need... . But if you get on it right away, they can generally ward off Lyme with antibiotics. Good thing Lynn has the habit of grooming all her men, young and old, like the good mother primate that she is. She doesn't eat what she finds however. Ticks go into the woodstove or down the toilet, or one of the boys will splatter them on the deck railing.

We've been having a rash of ticks around here this spring, picking them off the dogs and cats in record numbers. Generally the fall is tick season, but we had such a mild winter here along the coast of Maine, no subzero weather at all, that they all survived. Yet another of the manifold blessings of global warming.

debacle, n. A sudden, utter disaster. From the Fr. debacler, to break through the ice.

The dogs and I all went through the ice yesterday afternoon. It was as close to death as I've come on this property. I took the dogs for a walk, and we wound up down at the stream that empties the pond. Our Jack Russell, Mo, led the others out onto the ice before I got down there. When I got there I was worried. The day was warm, and I thought that the ice might be thin near the open water at the dam, where the stream's velocity is greatest. I called them back at once.

Too late. First the puppy fell though the ice. I knew that if a 35-lb. puppy on four big feet broke the ice, a 200-lb. man on two feet
certainly would. So I crawled out to him on my belly, put a hand under his butt, and pulled him up onto the ice. Then Mo went through, and I snaked over to him, but the ice under me gave way and I was in the water. I threw Mo up onto the ice with one hand, and tried to get myself out, but there was nothing to grab. I took out my Swiss Army knife, opened the big blade and stuck it into the ice, and using that as a handle, pulled myself up, threw my left leg up onto the ice and rolled over onto my back.

Our big mutt Paco was breaking himself a really big hole by the time I squirmed over to where he was thrashing about. He wouldn't come to my side of the hole, perhaps frightened even more by the panic in my voice. Finally he swam over to me and I heaved him up, but our combined weight broke through and I was in the icy water again. I stood on the bottom and pushed him up with both hands, and he walked away to the shore, shaking water as he went. I tried to heave myself up, but the ice kept breaking ahead of me. I was breathing hard, and as panicked as I've been in years. There was no one within a quarter-mile to hear a cry for help, and if I'd had my cell phone with me, it would have been soaked and useless. Mo stayed with me at the edge of the hole, looking really worried. I took out the knife again, pulled myself up, and slithered to shore.

Back at the house I stripped off all my soggy clothes on the deck, dried off the dogs, and got into the tub. Once I'd warmed up, and once my hands and feet stopped stinging, I got the smaller dogs and put them in the tub until they stopped shivering, soaping them up so they wouldn't smell like pond water. Then we all toweled off, I built a fire in the cookstove, and we all warmed up.

I accepted long ago that life is a crapshoot, and that any minute the bottom can fall out no matter how secure we might think we are, but here was yet another reminder, a beautiful afternoon turned in an instant into a life-or-death debacle. True, I didn't have to go out on the ice, but watching my beloved dogs freeze and drown simply wasn't an option. Once again I'm glad I carry a good pocket knife.

The dogs and I are alive and well, gentle Reader, and waiting for the spring.

Groundhog Day is the traditional midpoint of winter because it occurs halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Early Christians called it Candlemas, when believers would bring beeswax candles to the church to be blessed. For European pagans before the rise of Christianity, it was known as Imbolc, one of eight solar holidays in their calendar, consisting of the solstices, the equinoxes and the "quarter-days," of which Imbolc was one.

There's a old farmers' rhyme which I've heard but can't remember, to the effect that you should have left by Candlemas Day half the wood and half the hay, or you'd be in trouble. For those of us who heat with wood, this is no joke. April can indeed be the cruellest month if you're out of firewood, lengthening days or no, and there's still no new grass for the critters to eat. It's still grounds for divorce in Maine if a husband neglects to provide his wife with dry firewood for cooking, or worse, no wood at all.

It was my father's people, the Germans immigrants of Eastern Pennsylvania, the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, who brought over the lore of the groundhog and the shadow sometime in the 1800s. They had a similar folklore about badgers in the Old Country, and would not plant their crops until the badgers appeared in the spring. The Chamber of Commerce of Punxsutawney, PA, the self-proclaimed Groundhog Capital of the World, invented Punxsutawney Phil as a way to boost business, and it gradually became more and more of a media event.

When I was a kid growing up in Western PA, my brother and I used to hunt groundhogs on weekends with our grandfather, rambling around the back roads in his old Chrysler that smelled of pipe and cigar smoke, a .222 Remington with a 10-power scope in the back. We sighted in that little rifle and practiced until we could fire a 3-inch group at 200 yards. We seldom missed. I can attest that there were a lot of groundhogs in that part of PA, even after we were through. The farmers were eager to be rid of them, since they'd frequently break their haying equipment on burrow mounds. My grandfather would give the slain grounghogs to a poor black family on our way home. We'd pull up in front of their house and the old man would take his pipe out of his teeth and mutter to his wife "Here come the groundhog man." They said it tasted a lot like pork, and I guess that's why they call it ground hog.

I started a chimney fire Sunday evening. I filled the cookstove up with dry oak, left the draft and damper open to let it catch, then walked away to do some other chores and forgot about it. A woman passing by knocked at the door to tell us that flames were coming out the smaller chimney, and it was then that I heard the smoke alarm upstairs in our bedroom. I thanked her and dashed outside to look at the chimney, which had become a Roman candle. I wanted to keep an eye on it and let it burn out, but Lynn always insists on calling the fire dept. At 17 she watched her grandmother's cottage in Bayside burn to the ground, while standing in the road in her nightie, before the Northport volunteers showed up. All her stuff was in that cottage.

I view chimney fires as an embarrassment: an indicator that I've been negligent and let too much creosote build up in my chimneys, but they're Class A chimneys, with tile flues, and should withstand chimney fires. In the 21 years we've lived in this old house, and hundreds of cords of wood we've burned, this is the third time we've called the fire dept. for a chimney fire. Left to my own devices I'd have handled them all myself and never have called the firemen at all. Lynn views this as mere macho obstinancy, and perhaps she's right.

So the Belfast volunteers showed up, with a ladder truck and innumerable pickups with lights flashing. Two of the younger guys suited up and climbed a big ladder to check the flue, but they had no chains to clean it with, so I lent them mine. The chief was irritated at this; there should be a cleaning chain on every truck, he said. They rattled it around inside the flue and got a big bucket of steaming creosote out of it.

Ever the opportunist, Mo brought his Frisbee for the firemen to throw. Lynn had just made cookies, and she distrubuted them to the guys on the ground who were watching the guys on the roof, and we turned it into a pleasant little lawn party, while I reminisced with the older guys about our previous chimney fires. Lynn was glad she'd picked up the dogshit in the yard earlier that day or all the firemen would have stepped in it and tracked it into the house.

Satisfied that the fire was out and the flue was safe, the guys on the roof climbed down and stashed the ladder on the truck. The chief checked the flue with his mirror through the clean-out door in the cellar, to make sure there was nothing still burning. I thanked them all and they rolled away, back to their families on a Sunday evening.