Spring Reveals Potential For New Growth

The first thing to change is the light. In the hour of morning that was last month’s darkness I wake to today to find that light has already filled the sky. I do not roll over and fall back to sleep. Instead, I daydream of moist earth and all that can grow there, return there, now that winter has finally loosened its grip.

Birds thaw out old songs. For months they have been quiet or talking somewhere else, some warmer, more hospitable place. At first they sing tentatively, and only those with the hardiest voices. But now they are joined by many voices, both great and small.

I take the dog out for his morning walk and he sniffs the air with a new curiosity. Something is here that wasn’t here last month but his wet, black nose remembers it: a quickening.

He follows his same path, the path he has walked daily for most of his life. Last month he could walk across the top of the snow, his nails clicking on the icy crust. Today, the ground is muddy but rimmed with tentative grass, a cellular memory of a primordial green.

The deer have etched their delicate footprints in the soft ground. The apples we set out for them last night are gone. But a wisp of their sweet fragrance floats on the air like a promise. It is an old one, one we have kept for years with the deer and all the other wildlife that lives in the woods: apples for the pleasure of your company. Apples for a glimpse of a different life.

The yard and surrounding acreage is in chaos. The usual spring mess is compounded by the aftermath of November’s ice storm. Buried for months under a frozen cover of white, the damage is now obvious and unavoidable.

Huge trees that toppled in the storm span the length of the yard. The ones that we were able to cut into pieces before the winter freeze are stacked in dozens of piles. Brush and branches and thousands of pine needles cover every inch of ground. Many of the trees that did not fall are severed at the top, a jagged open wound that invites parasites and threatens the trees still standing.

Hunks and shards of broken glass, remnants of broken windows, stick up from the ground like tiny bayonets and stab at our boots. When we think we have gotten most of it, we find more. We keep looking. It is spring, just nearly. Our job is to clear a place for it.

Of course, it would come anyway. It is only our own fastidious arrogance that believes otherwise. Because whether or not the space is cleared, spring will barge in full of itself. Buds form, bloom glorious, live green, pass golden, die bare.

Actually die. Apparently die. Both.

There are dead trees in the yard. They will not stretch another season toward the sun. Their time is done. Or so it seems.

But our neighbor wants to use the wood for another’s winter fire. A fire he may sit before and tell a story to a child. The story may plant an idea. The idea may foster a dream. The dream may plant a tree. Or a different kind of good altogether. You can never tell where a story might take you. Especially one read in the firelight of an old tree.

There are living trees in the yard too. Old ones that survived the ravages of this year’s storm and all the storms before it. And new ones, seedlings, that fell to earth and planted themselves tenderly, tenaciously in the fierce and welcoming ground. Each will live and die. Actually and apparently. Both.

We are like them. Each of us following the rhythm of an ancient plan, the pattern of which we can only wonder at as we live out our varying shades of green. It is not only arrogance that clears a path for spring. It is reverence too.

The gift of living in a place with four district seasons is that we can witness nature’s external manifestation of all our internal possibilities. Spring, winter and all that comes between and after.

I walk down the path toward the woods. The sun, finally warm, shows the way. Buds form to bloom glorious.