There are two old maples at the end of our lane, and this notebook is, in a roundabout way, their fault.
Last spring I noticed that the left-hand tree comes into leaf almost a week before the right-hand one, every year, even though they are twenty feet apart and must be close to the same age. I wanted to know whether that was always true. I had no record. So I started one.
A year of small notes
It began as a line in a calendar — left maple, first leaves — and grew from there: the first swallows, the day the fog first came back in autumn, the week the lane flooded. Small, unimportant facts that are surprisingly hard to remember a year later.
At some point the notes got long enough that they wanted to be somewhere other than the margins of a calendar, and Maple Fog is the result. It is not much more than that: a place to keep track of the ordinary turning of the year, written mostly for myself.
This year
For the record: the left maple showed its first leaves on the eleventh of April, the right one on the seventeenth. Six days, again.
I still do not know why. I am not sure I want to.