Spring Ahead

Photo by the author

On a recent bike ride with some friends, we spied our first crocuses bursting into the still-winter-like landscape. Over the past few days, more and more of them have roused themselves up out of the cold earth. Every spring I’m struck with how “unlikely” (to steal a word from Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”) they are, how surreally-green, flowering amidst the barren sprawl of late-winter Connecticut (little to no snow even to give our eyes some aesthetic relief—just the emptied-of-leaves trees, the grey sky). And with the simple twist of a dial, our days are now longer still, dinner coming in the daylight hours, my dog, Charlie, confused as to why he’s eating so early, but happy to play along, the cats wondering why I am filling their bowls before they have stirred from their afternoon winter slumbers and sat staring at me, willing me into providing for them. 

This is the equinox, balance restored, an inflection point harkening the steady march to the paganistic climax of the solstice. If the sun is out, my wood stove won’t work as hard, the house warming itself now in the sudden directness of the sun. A half hour’s tossing of toys for Charlie in the yard at high noon will leave my head, face reddened, flushed. On yesterday’s bike ride, I shed a layer halfway into the ride, stuffing my wind-proof vest into a back jersey pocket, my fingers warm even just wearing my fingerless gloves. 

Red hawks have been mating in a dead ash tree that hovers precariously at the edge of my yard, screeching, wings a flutter, seeming one enormous thing, until the male lifts up and flies away, calling out, then gone. Robins tilt their heads, listening for invertebrates stirring just beneath the surface. This morning a flock of turkeys exploded from their forest roosts, careening across the yard and back into the woods on the other side, all in their sudden-chortling-wing-flapping turkey awkwardness and rough beauty. Spring springs despite all our human tomfoolery and intrigue and hapless disregard. A bobcat sprung from the underbrush, looked once over his shoulder at me pedaling along, then vanished into a thicket of thorns. The immense-alive world we too often fail to see for the forest of our daily frailties, indiscretions, insecurities…abides.   

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