Watershed Winter

BY DON DOUCETTE

You will grant me the free time to ramble with this watershed essay as we are hunkered down here at the house and property – our back two-third acre lot overlooks the Ten Mile River here in Attleboro.

It is early morning, still dark outside and a City sander just growled and sprinkled past the house. Everything otherwise is quiet. The word dormancy has taken on deeper meaning since the arrival of COVID and coupled with this new snow cover and deeper cold temperatures, autumn is in steep decline as official winter knocks at our door.

We keep a small suet feeder for the tiny more delicate birds in the front yard and this week just before the storm moved in, a large white seagull took advantage and landed on the front lawn for errant fat bits. The tiny birds usually vacuum those scraps, but not fast enough in this case.

The feeder hangs from a wild cherry tree which sprouted in situ some years ago. I have an affection for native wild cherry as during my youth, we had an abundance of those trees while living on the Thurber Farm in Attleboro and I loved to eat the tiny ripe sweet-tart fruit.

We kids enjoyed anything edible called berry. We would get into or grandfather’s cultivated red raspberries in season and we had a plethora of wild blackberries, small and large varieties – my mom made delicious upside-down cakes with those blackberries and including blueberries found growing in our wetlands along Twin Village Brook and the Thurber Farm Brook tributary.

Old Charlie Carpenter had an unusually fine patch of large blackberries growing behind his house situated across from the Dodgeville fire barn, – this patch was located next to Twin Village Brook. Charlie never bothered when we got into those berries – deep black and juicy bursts of taste, it was the large nasty thorns that did the biting back.

And there was the patch of translucent red currants dangling in tantalizing clusters in the ancient Thurber Family apple orchard and including our own rhubarb patch, a sweet and sour taste experience for youthful foraging connoisseurs.

And never to forget, the tart elderberry umbrella clusters growing along the southern shore of Caroufel’s Pond close to Thurber Avenue – the pond is gone now due to “civic improvements.” The tiny impoundment itself was once a neighborhood ice skating magnate, poof, vanished and now only a good memory.

Before the bridge ramp was built, Twin Village Brook was a Thurber Avenue dirt lane fording place for horses and wagons.

Enough for now, daylight is approaching soon enough…and I have rambled on…and come the new day, the Ten Mile River will take on a Currier and Ives winter persona as it quietly and ceaselessly flows to Narragansett Bay and so, we greet another fresh dawn with great expectation. Bon jour.

Don Doucette

“Ten Mile River Rambles”

Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook