Totman's Land, April

There’s a long road in my Western Mass town called Bardwells Ferry, because there’s a bridge over a river gorge where I assume there was once a ferry instead. It’s an amazing road, which opens from woods into a high stretch of farmland, overlapping hayfields, a few barns and old farmhouses, and the Berkshires in the background. It’s another place in Conway where you can play “back in time” if you want to. Because the farming families have been here for generations and the land has not been sold and subdivided and turned into houses with short green lawns and tree stumps where trees once stood, Good Lord this road is beautiful, breathtaking. In the fields and meadows and forests live black bears, and bobcats along with deer and rabbits and peeper frogs that sing loudly in the spring and summer.