Grasses and willow twigs take on a green sheen… sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. We go more days in a row without really cold temperatures. We finally notice that it hasn’t snowed for a while, and those odd piles of the stuff under evergreens, or in the corners of parking lots, take us by surprise. They look like archeological finds.
In our family spring’s approach used to herald itself to us by the flow of the maple sap, often in March or February. It foretold a lot of fun but also a lot of hours boiling… 40 gallons of sap plus 40 hours on the boil yields a single gallon of maple syrup. Cartwright’s and others are hosting long long lines. They’re cheerful waiting, even in the cold, for a taste. Because it tastes like spring.
But we haven’t made sugar for quite a few years now, so for us a spring wake-up call “sounds” at the bird feeder. After a few days of silently wondering, we each finally say it out loud. The goldfinches are taking on a faint yellow tinge or glow. Summer plumage is on the way, so spring must be coming soon.
Even before the goldfinch males flame forth in eye-assaulting yellow, and the females assume a much duller summer sheen, we’ll have taken down the bird feeders. Nowadays the Finger Lakes are bear country. Those of us who live outside the built-up section pretty much follow the Thanksgiving-to-Easter rule… only feed the birds when the bears are sound asleep hibernating. So empty feeders, or feeders put away, are signs of spring.
Before we let our feeder run dry this month, it was one day surrounded by brightly-epauletted red-wing blackbird males, scrounging for seeds that had fallen to the ground. In northern Vermont, it’s almost spring when the crows come back. Around here, it’s the red-wings.
In Bath, the eagles and the ospreys return, and start inspecting last season’s nests.
The ice on the little ponds melts, and one day it melts for the last time. It will take seven or eight months to freeze them again. Anglers get their gear out, clean it up, undo tangles, and do some overhauls. The town clerks get set for an onslaught of license buyers.
One morning we scrape the car for the last time, but if we had to name the date, we probably couldn’t. Suddenly we’ll just notice that we haven’t done it for a while, and smugly realize that we won’t, either.
About the end of the first week in February, we notice that the sun’s setting later. Hooray!
Snowdrops push up in gardens, at least in the gardens that get good sun, followed by crocuses. Color again! At last! Here and there, if you walk the woods or the fields, a green sprig or a flowering plant bursts forth, defying its still-moribund neighbors. Just about everything else was still dormant one day when I found a flabbergastingly flowering round-lobed hepatica on Mount Washington, along the Finger Lakes Trail. In Rhode Island a hundred years ago, people went arbutusing in spring.
The world unlocks, sometimes inconveniently. In Vermont the season after maple season is mud season.
For youngsters not too long ago, spring meant new clothes (often unwelcome, if truth be told), for Easter. Even today it still means palm branches (perhaps of construction paper), church breakfasts, chocolate rabbits, and marshmallow Peeps. Or else it means a big meal with a big family, ritual questions, and a glass for Elijah.
Musing on the death of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman wrote, “Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, and thought of him I love.” We hope spring brings you happier triggers, and happier memories.