A Proper Spring
For the past twenty years, the snow has still been thick around the house this time of year. There are storms ahead, more snow will fall, and there will be a long stretch of watching a very slow melt creep across the ground. In the deepest shadows under the eaves, where the snow is the thickest, we take note of the icy white piles and place bets about when they will shrink to the size of a dinner plate and disappear, someday in June. But there is none of that this year. There is no snow, the ground is already bare, and our old friends the snowbanks never arrived. Early March has never been the time to rifle through the garage to find the rake again — it’s usually snow shovels and skis right on into April.
Three weeks ago, the most subtle signs of spring had just begun, high up in the trees. The blush on the willow is the first to show, and it’s just a shade of difference, a luminescent brightening from within. Against the endless stretch of white snow, it is easy to miss. It took me many Vermont winters before I began to notice that even in the deepest, coldest air, the trees were absorbing the light of the sun and beginning to stir. To those who are watching in the crisp, single-digit air, it becomes clear that it is not the temperature, but the minutes of daylight, that set the pace of the seasons. When I inspected the buds on the branches — the lilac, the apple, the forsythia, the magnolia — looking for signs of swelling, there was nothing. The air was warm, but not a bud had budged. All were still wrapped tight in winter’s dark.
On that steamy day at the beginning of March, I found the rake, pulled on my gloves, and began to scratch at the bare ground anyway. The movement of my arms felt familiar and natural, but nothing else did. It was bikini weather, yet the grass was still brown and all living plants still looked completely dead. The sun felt wrong on my skin, the rake felt wrong on the ground, it was a strange, eerie scene. The world had literally changed, nothing was happening the way it used to, and after a few bleak minutes, I put the rake away for another day.
The seasons usually go like this: first, the snow twirls down, the piles grow higher, and the familiar landscape is completely transformed into a billowy, rolling canvas. Everything outside is soon just a bump in the glistening white canopy that settles down for a long winter stay. The world is gracefully, gratefully, covered over, erased by the snow, tabula rasa. This goes on for months, and snow lovers rejoice with each new storm, each new layer of bright, clean, crystal beauty to round the corners and smooth the edges.
By late March, even the snow lovers will admit they are ready for the melt to begin. The sun stays longer each day and gets a little stronger in the sky, and when the great snow blankets begin to melt, they run away in rivulets across the soft, smooshy ground. March can be cold, but even in the coldest air, the sun at high noon evaporates the snow into vapor, and the frozen layer on the earth is slowly peeled back. Like a slow-motion wave receding, the crumbling walls, little pebbles and bits of sand tinkle down the lacy face into scree piles at the bottom. The grit and ice crumble under the sun, and the things revealed underneath are cold and wet, like something just brought up from the bottom of the ocean. Everything is blinking in the brightness, fizzing with newness, ancient and reborn.
Once most of the snow is gone, but still lingering in the corners, the bubbling, saturated ground firms up under the sun, and it’s time to explore the land anew. It’s also time to pick up the windblown trash, the broken branches, and the many forgotten things from last fall. Walking around the yard is like revisiting an old memory, or a past life. Everything you left behind is still there, just as you left it, but slightly altered. The shapes and colors that were hidden for so long are familiar, yet strange— the garden bench, I remember you! Oh, look, there’s a mug of tea I left outside, the inspirational message still says the same thing. And there’s my favorite towel. How did that get out here?
Some years, the scale of the cleanup can be a lot to reckon with. The piles of stalks from the garden beds, sawed down in great bundles, are still waiting to be delivered to the compost pile, another project paused in the middle. The snow plow has gouged the lawn and left loads of gravel in the grass. It appears you neglected to clean up after that party around the fire, garden pots froze and broke, leaving you with shards. You secretly wish the snow would come back to throw the covers over the whole mess again. It looked better that way.
All of the glistening, wet, forgotten things are put away in their proper places, and then, finally, it’s time to sort through the garage to find the rake. We comb the grasses and break the seal of the soil to let the sun and air in, uncovering spots that had been made dead with fallen leaves. Raking is a vigorous rubdown after the long, tight squeeze of winter, like scrubbing a newborn foal with a handful of hay, or a mother’s rough tongue. A nice scratching on the surface says Hello there, time to wake up now, let me see if I can help.
Three weeks ago, I wasn’t ready for this, and neither was anything else. But today — today was a great day for raking. The temperature and the hours of sunlight have caught up with each other, the equinox is near, there is balance. It is actually spring, and both the calendar and the earth know it. The lilac blooms are swelling, the catkins are out on a few birch trees, and I found yellow witch hazel stars and pussy willow blooming by the roadside.
I raked and raked today, making little piles across the lawn, revealing the gardens and the walkways, filled with so many thoughts about what to plant where. The future gardens are coming into view, the grass is greening up right before my eyes, and the blades of the two hundred bulbs we planted are standing taller. The sun makes sense today, and all of those bizarre, warm, unsettling and snowless winter weeks are behind us.
We haven’t earned this spring. It was a confusing winter of color, edges, and ease, and it can be hard to enjoy something you don’t feel you deserve. There isn’t a single snow pile to melt, not even in the darkest corners, and I miss them terribly. But the birds are here and calling for mates, the light is long, the sap is running, and the buds are getting ready to burst. Soon, the earth will be blossoming into a kaleidoscope riot of springtime yes.
