At 4:37 a.m. on March 20, we officially passed into spring with the vernal equinox.

We’ve tipped the scales and there is a little more light every day. Our family joined plenty of other folks around the area with a big fire in the backyard to boil down sap. I saw two trumpeter swans fly across the fields just as I was putting the maple syrup into jars.

In the greenhouse, our onion seeds are up about an inch in their flats. After checking on the starts, I grabbed an onion from the root cellar on my way back to the house to cook dinner and I thought about how the onion in my hand had been t...