Spring springs slowly

It took a long time for spring to arrive this year.

The leaves all blew off the trees during Hurricane Sandy late last October, and the branches have been bare ever since. Bare enough to disappear under the two feet of snow that fell during Snowstorm Nemo, and the many inches that fell before and after that February storm.

And then the snow finally melted, and the branches stayed bare for weeks longer. The air was chilly and the ground hard and brown. I didn’t think about it much until we traveled south to Washington, D.C. in mid-April. There, in the warm sunshine, with freshly sprouted grass and blossoming trees all around us, the kids seemed to open up just like the blossoms, playing and exulting in the warm air they’d missed out on for so many months.

When we returned home, though, our lawn was still brown, our trees still bare, our shrubbery gray. There had even been a little bit of sleet in our absence.

So we waited. And then finally in the past week or so, our world turned green, the vibrant green of spring. Tiny leaves appeared on the trees and bushes. The grass on our lawn grew in bright green as well. Sunlight warmed the air. The kids and I started playing badminton nightly after dinner in the fading sunlight, something we never do when it’s below about 60 degrees. Yesterday at her painting class, Holly sat on a mat in the grass and painted a patch of yellow and purple flowers, so now we have a painting in the dining room with colors as vivid as those outside, where the daffodils that were planted long before we moved here are blooming once again.

Yet when I went for a walk after dinner last night, I noticed how many branches still didn’t have any leaves, how many patches of lawn have yet to grow in, how many buds on our neighbors’ apple trees haven’t opened yet. And somehow that was comforting too. It reminded me that this doesn’t all happen at once: spring has been magnificent these past several days, but there’s still more of it to come. Seasons in New England tend to unfold slowly, and it was good realize that we’ll keep discovering new blossoms and fresh greenery for weeks to come.

It would be a mistake to rush through this phase of slow blossoming. Summer, with its holidays and vacations and trips, carries with it more overt excitement and celebration than spring. Spring has a quieter splendor, and this week I’m reminding myself to stop counting the days until summer vacation and enjoy every moment of May.

Spring ahead (even if it's not spring)

I’m still not accustomed to the earlier date for starting daylight saving time.

Even in this winter-less winter, it feels too early to have sunlight at dinnertime. Daylight saving seems like it should be a precursor to summer, and that made sense when it used to fall in April, once spring was well under way. To have the clocks change before winter has even ended – by the calendar if not by the thermometer – still seems strange to me.

And yet it’s hard not to welcome the extra daylight, and the irrepressible surge of energy it brings. Losing an hour is hard for me; harder than it should be – as I said to my 19-year-old niece yesterday, I keep thinking someday I’ll be an organized and caught-up enough person that one hour really won’t make a difference to me either way, but unfortunately I’m not there yet – but it’s hard to argue with the tradeoff. Seeing sunlight last well into the early evening is inspiring, no matter when it occurs.

So I struggled to get out of bed at seven Sunday morning, intent on starting what felt like a new season with the change of clocks on the right foot rather than letting myself sleep in. The kids both slept late, not having any interest in making an effort to adjust to the new time, and that gave me hours in the morning with which I would have liked to read the Sunday papers but instead completed my 2011 mileage chart to send our tax accountant. Tedious, but necessary; and a decent way to make good use of the morning.

Energized by the sunshine, I tinkered a little bit with making parts of the house look nicer – rearranging knickknacks, putting away paperwork -- and Rick got the the kids to tidy up the playroom while I was out running. By the end of the day, we all felt as if we’d done a touch of spring cleaning.

The sunlight lasted well past dinnertime. Yes, it’s still technically winter, but the clocks have changed and the daylight stretches into the evening now, which to my mind makes it feel more like the onset of spring than any change in temperature could. Longer days are coming, and with them summer. It was a beautiful start to a new season.

Weeding

It was an unexpectedly warm afternoon yesterday, almost summery. I’d been at home taking care of a feverish Tim all day, interspersing my writing assignments with Motrin doses and beverage refills for him, but when Rick arrived home early, I realized there was still a little time for me to get out into the sunshine, so I rode my bike to the post office. It’s a lovely ride from our new address: an easy fifteen-minute glide, and being on my bike again made me feel like spring was already segueing into summer.

Then as I was leaving the post office, I looked down at the ground and saw an even more promising sign of spring: a clump of weeds. Delighted, I bent over and started plucking them out of the ground.

I love weeding. It’s my favorite outdoor-maintenance activity, though admittedly that’s a small category in which to hold a title. I just find it so satisfying to pull weeds out of the earth. It’s so quantitative. You can track your own success so easily, at least for a day or so. Then they start to grow back, and you can do it all over again. Sisyphan, true, but also so much more measurable than so many of the tasks I try to accomplish every day.

And it’s gotten to the point where I weed wherever I am: my own yard, public spaces, other people’s front walks. I just really like the feeling of the tiny plants being disengaged at the root. So with warm weather and summer hovering on the horizon, and a damp rainy spring behind us, I’m looking forward to lots more weeding. I wouldn’t call it a talent so much as a passion. I don’t even care that much what the lawn or garden looks like after it’s weeded: I just like getting rid of the weeds. Perhaps it reminds me of editing a little bit, or de-cluttering the house: all the various ways I eliminate those pieces not deemed essential. Except that in weeding, unlike editing or decluttering, you can actually reach an end point.

So I’ll keep seeking out weeds as the days grow longer and the temperatures climb. My fingers become dirty but my mind grows ever clearer as I remove impediments, one tiny shoot at a time.

Springtime arrives

The weekend was mild and sunny, but yesterday was even better than that: warm and truly spring-like. The very last pile of snow finally disappeared from our yard. I went running in a t-shirt and tights: two layers fewer than I’ve worn for the five preceding months.

My aunt sent us a floral arrangement late last week as a housewarming present, and the flowers are filling the kitchen with perfume. I placed them on the table near the deck and opened the glass door to let the fresh air flow in through the screen. Even though I knew the flower scent was coming from the bouquet indoors and not from anything blooming outdoors, it made me think the ground was softening and shoots might soon appear; maybe flowers too. We don’t know, since this yard is new to us, what might be planted in the mulch beds around the house, but maybe the scent of outdoor blossoms will soon grace our yard.

The grass covers the ground only very thinly, and much of it is still straw-colored, but the smell of fresh dirt in the air makes me think we’ll soon find fresh green grass growing. I can still see far into the woods surrounding our house; the oaks are bare and even the evergreens seem scraggly, but the warm air reminds me that the leaves, like the grass, will soon enough be thick and green. The walk we did through the woods Sunday gave us the chance to orient ourselves on these trails, all new to us, a little bit, and it was easier to navigate our way with the leafless trees offering such long sight lines. By the time large floppy oak leaves obscure much of the view through the forest, we hope we’ll know the trails well enough to find out way without the extra visibility that the current starkness provides. Of course, when the leaves reach their thickest point, it will also be time for the mosquitoes to hatch, and we’ll probably avoid the woods until the days grow hotter and the yearly mosquito infestation subsides.

With the four feet of snow that covered the ground for much of this winter, spring was slow to arrive. But this weekend it came back: to the ground, to the forests, to the swamps and ponds in the form of ducks and geese paddling along. I’m still feeding the cows three bales of hay from the barn every morning, but they mouth the ground as if they’re practicing for grazing season or maybe hoping that doing so will hurry the growing process along. In another month, they’ll be grazing, and the month after that we’ll be doing the first hay-cutting of the year. One cow will deliver a calf sometime this spring, for the calf’s sake we’ll hope for a string of warm dry days when that time comes, though plenty of times calves arrive during chilly and rainy stretches and still manage to thrive.

The evening sky stays light well after seven o’clock. The sun rises well before the kids are up for school. The year is turning: from a remarkably snowy winter into what is finally turning out to be a mild and gentle spring. Cold days may still come, but we’re glad to have the beautiful days with which this week began, and we look forward to grass, leaves, flowers, and all the blessings of spring that still lie ahead.

Late late winter, spring approaching

I always call this time of year late winter, but last night I realized it’s latest winter: barely a week until the Spring Equinox.

Spring Equinox has such a pretty sound. All of those old-fashioned seasonal terms do – solstice, equinox, harvest moon – but yesterday it was particularly inspiring to think of spring starting in just another week. The past couple of days haven’t exactly been sunny and warm, but they have definitely held a hint of winter’s retreat. With temperatures above freezing all weekend, the snowbanks are rapidly melting away from the edge of the roadway, and mud is beginning to advance over much of the ground where snow has laid claim for the past three months.

The brook is rushing, not reaching alarming levels yet but starting to run high as it does every spring; with this much water swelling the banks, there’s no chance it will freeze again. And the cows seem to sense the change in season as well: even though a mix of snow and mud still cover the fields where in a few more months they’ll graze, they’ve been wandering over to the brook and out to the far pasture recently, whereas in the dead of winter they don’t leave the hard-packed dirt right in front of the hay barn. Even without the option of grazing, they seem curious to see what’s new in the woods and across the field, or maybe they’re just restless, but it’s inspiring to see them roaming beyond their usual tightly circumscribed winter route of barn to trough and back.

The kids exclaimed with delight when they spotted chipmunks this weekend, and the dog chased a flock of geese out of the field. I think she was as happy to be running fast over the rapidly diminishing snow cover as she was to think she could catch a fowl, which of course she can’t. But the geese and the chipmunks alike are a sign of spring encroaching.

And yesterday we turned the clocks forward, which gives us the first hint of summer’s long sunlit evenings. Summer still feels far away: the temperature is after all only in the 40’s, and with the depth of snow we had this winter, it could still be weeks before the last of it melts away. But indeed, it’s late late winter: spring begins next week. The earth, the sky, the animals all seem ready to transition into a new season, and I too welcome the softness in the air, the light in the sky, the muddy ground, the certainty that spring will soon arrive.

Mud season

I never expected mud to be something for which I’d feel so grateful.

But we had a balmy weekend, and the four feet of snow as well as the three or four inches of ice that have covered various parts of the ground had plenty of time to melt over the past forty-eight hours. And melt they did, thank heavens.

It wasn’t a bright sunny weekend; it was cloudy and foggy. So the melting ice and snow didn’t evaporate, as they would have (at least partially) on a sunny day. Instead, they just soaked slowly into the ground. The fields are still covered with snow – albeit a few inches less than before this recent melting – but the driveway is down to bare gravel now, so the melting ice perked its way into the dirt and created mud. Lots and lots of mud.

Mud is not something I previously would have thought to honor. Yes, it’s good for growing; but to me it mostly means that things get dirtier: things like cars, dogs, children and floors.

Not today, though. Today the mud meant the absence of ice, and I welcomed it. As a runner, I’ve suffered mightily this winter from the presence of ice. It has made running treacherous some days and nearly impossible others, even with my normally reliable Yak Trax on. But the Yak Trax are four years old by now, and by the middle of last week pieces had snapped on both the left and the right one.

My only big fall of the season came when I was walking, though, and it might have been the last icy day we’ll have (knock on wood). It was Saturday morning as I headed out to the barn, and it was black ice, the kind that looks like water. I fell slowly, pitching forward, trying for what felt like minutes rather than milliseconds to regain my footing before hitting the ground. And when I did hit the ground, it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. I was wearing my barn coveralls and work gloves: plenty of padding there, and even my palms showed no beads of blood, though they stung, as did my knees and a few other parts. Five minutes later in the barnyard I made a stupid mistake that involved opening a gate too wide and then not being able to prevent a cow from showing her way through it; I felt like the distraction of having fallen on the ice was partly to blame for my mindlessness.

But as of late yesterday, there’s no more ice, just mounds and mounds of mud. I went running just before dusk, and it felt wonderful under my feet: soft and yielding, with blissful traction where just days earlier there was only a slippery glaze.

As I ran, I listened to the trickle of water: from the lightly falling rain as it splashed into accumulating puddles of snowmelt. It reminded me of the scene at the end of The Long Winter, which Holly and I read together last year, in which Laura wakes up in the middle of the night toward the end of a brutal winter of nonstop blizzards and hears a trickling sound. At first she doesn’t know what it is, and then realizes it’s the first time she’s heard the sound of running water in months. She knows then that the snows are over. And it reminded me also of the dripping sound that Christopher McCandless hears in the film “Into the Wild’ as he wakes one morning in the Alaskan tundra, and he too knows it means winter is ending, though in his case it turns out to be too late for him to survive.

Survival, mercifully, isn’t the issue here as ice turns to water and creates mud: it’s purely psychological and not a matter of life and death to know that the temperature is rising and the ice is receding. Temperatures in the forties are predicted all week; I shouldn’t have problems with ice again for the foreseeable future, and that’s a huge relief. Mud. I never knew what a comfort it could be, but this week, mud represents the best meteorological development I could hope to see.

The cows are by the pond -- is that a sign of spring?

Throughout most of the winter, the cows stay close to the hay barn. Although they have free range over several acres of pastures and woods, they tend to huddle in the cold weather, moving little from the spot where I set their haybales every morning.

This doesn't seem surprising to me. I always assumed it was because they conserve energy and retain heat by staying put, and because they are not particularly comfortable slogging through snow drifts, not to mention the fact that when the fields are frozen or snow-covered, there’s nothing for them to graze on, so why bother to move away from the spot where they are fed, even once they’ve finished eating for the day?

So I was a little bit thrilled to look out the window yesterday afternoon and see that all six of them had crossed over two pastures to mill around by the pond, where they often graze in the summer. It made me think that although the temperatures rose no higher than the mid-30’s and wet snow fell for much of the morning, the cows might be detecting a tinge of spring.

I myself certainly wasn’t. When I went out running midmorning, I was wearing as many layers over my head, neck and torso as I do in January. But I was encouraged to think maybe the cows sensed something I didn’t. It is early March, after all. Spring should be on the way, at least fairly soon. Tim announced a few days ago that he’d seen Canada geese in the sky, which he considers the first sign of spring.

Still, if I woke from a six-month sleep today and didn’t have a calendar, I’m not sure I would have been able to identify this as early March. So I’m curious to know if the cows really were reacting to something in the air, or in their bovine limbic systems, or in their memories. Because not only is it reassuring to think that spring hovers somewhere close ahead, but it’s also appealing to imagine that animals feel changes in the seasons even if we don’t.

I’m a little ashamed of how out of touch with the weather I can be. It’s true that running a mile or more every single day puts me in closer and more constant proximity to the weather than I ever used to be. As I’ve written about before, the fact that I'm outside for at least those ten minutes every day means I always have some idea about how cold or warm it is and whether any precipitation is falling.

But at the same time, I check my computer every morning to see what the temperature is, and sometimes before I go out to feed the cows I check on the digital thermometer connected to our household heating system. Even though we have a traditional mercury thermometer on the porch, I somehow feel more assured if I see the numeric version on my computer screen or on the thermostat, which I realize makes no sense at all, especially as at that point I am seconds from going out into the weather myself.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote in The Age of Missing Information about the peculiar and disturbing fact that in the 20th century, Americans developed the ability to turn on the Weather Channel and check the forecast anywhere in the world but have lost the ability to hold a finger in the air and determine which direction the wind is blowing from, not to mention determine from that information what kind of weather is likely on the way. Similarly, I consult the table in the newspaper every day to see what time sunrise and sunset is, having lost the ability my ancestors presumably had to keep track of the solar cycles by, well, looking at the sky.

So I’m left to wonder if the cows detect spring in the air – maybe even temperatures in the 40’s by this weekend? – or whether they were just tired of standing by the barn and chose to alleviate their cabin fever by taking a ramble over to the pond. And I feel sheepish, no pun intended, about the fact that I check my computer screen for the temperature and the newspaper for the forecast before I go outside, rather than feeling the breeze and smelling the air and watching the sky to obtain information. It all makes me wonder what else the cows might know that I don’t.

Or if maybe they don’t have any special animal sense at all of when spring is coming, but just saw a break in the precipitation and used it to go for a stroll to the pond, rather than worrying about when the next forecasted snowfall would begin.