It’s easy to forget the winter when in the middle of summer all the trees are full and green, lazily being blown by hot breezes as dragonflies buzz through the air in doubled up mating pairs. The water in the pond is getting thick and low, and when we canoed to the middle of it the other day we spotted something big and round bobbing in the water, choked by lilies. As we got closer we noticed the telltale flies; it was a dead and bloated snapping turtle, as big as a large serving tray, his carapace covered with thick black-green algae. I used my oar to lift his head, the eyes turned to a white blue, his strong jaws closed and leaking mille-foil plants.

You forget how much death there is in the summer: the broad winged turkey vultures have their pick, circling under the light cirrous clouds, never flapping, but slowly, insidiously hovering without exertion. There is so much surplus that they seem to leave the road kill to the opportunist crows, and instead take their meals on the more delectable slow deaths, in the forest, or in the field. The left-overs of predators and raptors.

I was thinking back to February: how every day in the dead of winter, when the sun would drop out of sight at 4ish and the mornings were cold and brutal, every day we would eat lunch on the enclosed porch of the winery that has a long row of tall windows that open up a view of the distant and small Marlboro Mountains. The sun would already be on its descent by 1pm and we would squint over stew and bread, and wonder what the glint was on the top of the hill so far away. One day the UPS man told us, it’s a home, I’ve been there, a really nice home, and we thought greedily, enviously, of owning a home that has a view of the real mountains behind us that they must have a view of. A house that’s big and has two stories, and many acres and dogs and big windows that reflect the sun like a big beacon on the Hudson.

One of the things that we would look forward to was the Northern Harrier. We like to say his name in an English accent, so Harrier sounds like Harriah, the r’s rolling on our tongue. It took us a while to figure out who he was, as we are novices, but we persevered and scoured our Sibley’s bible and narrowed it down to the harrier by noticing the white patch on his rump that shows when he flies, between tail and back. He’s called the marsh hawk, and his rufous chest belied his youth. A juvenile, says our guide. As we would eat, he would eat, skimming the dead fields for mice or voles, the winter hours encroaching. He was reliable as my stomach, always hungry when we were hungry for lunch.

Now we don't see him anymore as he probably has better places to feed, or perhaps he went north. No one seems to feed on the fields that are now choked with loosestrife, brambles and different kinds of grasses. Under those billowing weeds are lots of little families of rodentia, prospering and safe.