Mud-Less Season - NYTimes.com There are clear advantages to a spring without mud. I have not lost a boot to the suction of the barnyard swamp. I haven't had to cut drainage channels through the corral. Nor have I had to tractor through primeval ooze while hauling a round bale to the run-in shed. Still, something is missing in a season in which the forsythia came and went without mud. In a well-drained garden, mud season makes it easy to do your spading, whether you plant potatoes on Good Friday, as my uncle does, or merely prepare the earth for tomatoes to come. What we have this year, dry earth, is intractable stuff - hard, powdery and too light in color. What rain has fallen has barely laid the dust, and even a good storm now wouldn't raise the kind of mud I've come to expect over the years. Mud season is more complex than that. It needs frozen ground, good snowpack and a sudden thaw. The mud of mud season isn't merely waterlogged dirt. It is upheaval, the amphibian earth changing shape before your eyes. It is the seed of spring in the corpse of winter. Just now the maples carry immature leaves that look like small, folded batwings. The metasequoia is preparing to jump another foot in height. All the conifers are showing the first bright green of their intentions. Only the hickories pretend this ebullience is folly. Spring has to prove itself before a hickory will come into leaf. It is the between time, even without enough mud to say so. The night song of the peepers has faded, but the Canada goslings haven't hatched. Robins are here, but no catbirds or swallows. In the garden, the chives have a long head start on the asparagus. Mars is high above, Orion subsiding, when Ceilidh the terrier and I take our last walk at night. We look at the sky, we sniff the air and when we come back in our feet are perfectly dry.