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Is It Spring Yet?

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Is it spring yet?
The meteorologists and the astronomers both agree that spring starts in March, though they have different dates and different reasons. So when we ask if spring has, come, the answer us no, not quite.
And yet…
The goldfinches are getting their yellow coloration back. The bulbs that we planted last fall are starting to send up shoots.
The sun is getting up earlier, and going down later… a process that has continued a few minutes each day since late December, but is truly noticeable (and inspiring!) by now.
The sap is active in the maple trees again, and those who tap are hard at work. It runs best when the day’s above freezing, and the night’s below, and that’s where we are right now (most days, and most nights).
Some of those who collect still use buckets, but tube systems are widely used here in the 21st century, making life easier for the farmer, and sap cleaner for the boiler.
Cartwright’s Maple Tree Inn, between Birdsall and Short Tract, is serving now, and hopes to continue through April 10 (except Mondays and Easter). For generations of western New Yorkers a visit to Cartwright’s, standing in a chilly line to get pancakes and “estate” syrup, is a sure sign of spring. (And while Cartwright’s may be the most venerable of our producers, it’s far from the only one.)
Ice is melting in the ponds and streams and gullies. Once the wetlands are clear, the red-wing blackbirds will return, rattling out their skeeeeeeeeee call from the cattails.
Snow is receding, shrinking back from its own edges. The piles at the supermarket, and next to our driveways, are sinking lower and lower. One day they’ll be gone altogether, and we won’t even notice. One day we’ll put on our gloves or our mittens or our earmuffs, and it will be the last time this season, and we won’t know it, or even notice it.
The bears will start getting up, and those with cubs will be argumentative, and all of them will be famished. Most people will spend a lifetime hiking in the woods and never see a bear, but we still need to be alert and cautious. Here in western New York, when the bears awake we need to take the birdfeeders in – fill them from Thanksgiving to Easter is a good rule of thumb.
Hepatica, Mayapple, trillium, and arbutus will peek out at last, and so will skunk cabbage. It’s not very attractive, but it should ignite a spark of joy. When the skunk cabbage appear, spring is at hand at last!
Easter fashions are not what they used to be, but Easter candy will soon overflow the shelves in the stores. Churches will ring their bells and celebrate Christianity’s great day.
A few students will stare out the windows of their classrooms, then surreptitiously make a set of marks to count the days until summer vacation, and then cross them off one by one. This will require a hard decision. Cross the day off when you arrive in the morning, or wait until you leave in the afternoon?
One day the forsythia will burst with yellow. One day we’ll see the first robin, and another day the first monarch. It will be spring. At last.

Ever-Returning Spring

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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.