I could blame the Netflix special. 

Or his new album that dropped late last week. 

The truth is, Noah Kahan’s Stick Season has been playing on repeat inside my brain for weeks now for reasons that have little to do with the favorite son of Vermont and pop folk darling who’s taken the internet and the airwaves by storm these past few years. 

I blame the sticks. 

All 3,498 of them — give or take a few dozen — that have taken up residence on my lawn. 

When Kahan’s song went viral, he taught much of the country about the very New England custom of referring to the fall as “stick season,” but I'd like to respectfully submit that whoever named stick season has never stood in a backyard in upstate New York in late April staring at what appears to be the aftermath of a major logging operation. 

To borrow a phrase from Kahan, “I love New York, but it’s the season of the stick.”

Some have been there since November. OK, October. Come to think of it, it was pretty windy in September.

The point is, they’ve been multiplying like the bunnies with their cotton tails that have reappeared in the grass. My motivation to deal with them has not.

My intentions are good. I’ll look out the kitchen window while I’m scrubbing scrambled eggs from the frying pan on a Tuesday and think, “I need to do something about the sticks this weekend.”

Then it’s the weekend, and it’s 34 degrees and snowing in late April. You reason with yourself that you just put your scarf in the laundry basket on Friday when it was 75 degrees, so you’d better run a load through the washing machine instead. 

And then it’s another weekend, and you’d do something about the small forest that’s relocated itself in your yard, but you’ve got to fill the five giant holes a groundhog just dug out under your shed, and the rake you’ve had for 15 years just broke in two. 

And then it's another weekend, and the forecast says 75 and sunny, and you think: this is it. This is the weekend.

You put on your shoes, and you head for the shed to find the wagon and the work gloves. 

The sun is warm on your face. The dog is rolling in the grass. 

Nearby someone’s mowing the lawn for the first time this year, and there’s a gentle breeze blowing the smell of fresh cut grass your way.

The lawn chairs are blocking the wagon. You drag them out into the center of the lawn. 

You sit down. Just for a minute, you think. 

The sticks can wait. The season’s just getting started.