Spring Approacheth

The sun has shone (mostly) for almost this whole week. Though the ground is still covered with snow, the ice on the roads has melted and someone was on the grounds this week pruning dead branches from the trees that might in a month or so begin to sprout buds. Spring happens in stages and is not necessarily progressive. Sometimes in April or May Nature asserts itself and dumps somewhere from six to twelve inches of snow and the temperature drops precipitously and the winter coats and boots we had hoped to put away are recovered from the cold weather closets and adorned with not a little animus. But the snow does not last and under it the grass remains green.

     But for me the first true stage leading to Spring is marked at the lengthening of the day. Tonight, February yet, the dark will not descend fully until after 6:00pm; last month there was little daylight if there was any left at 5:00pm! The rhythm of the days change with the increase of sunlight: in the darkness winter meals are prepared and eaten early; I head to bed and sleep with little regret. But in the increasing daylight hours dinners occur later and I try to stay awake longer. I don’t necessarily saunter more in the outdoors yet: the temperatures still range during the day between the low twenties and forties, but the sun is angling more directly to the earth and the air is warmer. The invisible ice melts. Braver souls than I actually begin to sport their warm weather attire and don shorts—a practice that never ceases to amaze and surprise me: the original non-violent and even welcome shock and awe! And the change in clothes does offer me a vision of the coming of Spring. Bodies come back into view. 

     I think with joy of Thoreau’s chapter in Walden celebrating the arrival of Spring. He hears the ice crack on the pond, and watches as the earth excretes the mess that had lain frozen during the long winter. “True,” he says, “it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels . . . but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels . . . This is the frost coming our of the ground; this is Spring.” The very rhythm of his sentences celebrates the coming of Spring and the opening of Nature. He announces joyfully, “Walden is melting apace . . . Walden was dead and is alive again!” There is hope renewed.