Tag Archives: Spring

March On!

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“March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.” I remember my parents explaining that many years ago, as I puzzled over the Sunday funnies back in Rhode Island – how the month often begins with blustery winds, and ends with the first sweet signs of spring.
Perhaps Charlie Brown was trying to fly his kite in those funnies, for March is kite-flying month.
One of those first sweet signs of spring… or maybe not-so-sweet… is skunk cabbage appearing where the ground is streaked with wet, after the snow is gone.
March takes it name from Mars, the Roman god of war… “martial” is another related word. The war god suits well with the blustering gusts.
Heavier-than-air travel came to Steuben on March 12, 1908, when Casey Baldwin piloted “Red Wing” 319 feet across the frozen surface of Keuka Lake. After Dayton and Kitty Hawk, Keuka may have been the next place an airplane flew in America.
March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, when the ancient Irish saint is honored, and all things Irsh along with him. For many years Hornell has hosted a St. Patrick’s Day parade. (It’s also the day that Casey Baldwin wrecked the “Red Wing,” on its second try, making the first airplane CRASH in Steuben.)
The Super Bowl being over with, we now experience March Madness, the collegiate blood-bath that ends with one (very tired) team still standing.
March 4 used to be presidential inauguration day, but during the Franklin Roosevelt administration it was moved to January 20, communications and transportation having improved a little since 1787.
March 1 is the first day of METEOROLOGICAL spring, while the vernal equinox (first day of ASTRONOMICAL spring) comes on the 20th or 21st. Julius Caesar was assassinated on the 15th, despite having been warned to “Beware the Ides of March!” Daylight savings time begins in March.
The Salem witch trials began in March (it had been a bad winter), and Napoleon returned from Elba to once again threaten the peace of Europe. A hundred days later, with tens of thousands dead on the field at Waterloo, he was on his way to St. Helena. Few rulers have contrived to get so many men killed, in such a short reign, to such little effect.
The Boston Massacre also took place in March, and Santa Ana captured the Alamo. In March of 1918, scientists first recognized the Spanish influenza. In March 2020, we began COVID shutdowns. The March blizzard of 1888 killed 400 people, mostly in and around New York City.
The world’s first national park (Yellowstone, 1872) and America’s first National Wildlife Refuge (Pelican Island, 1903) were created in March – that alone makes March a great month. Michelangelo was born in March, and Johann Sebastian Bach, which is also very special. Almost 200 years ago a former Steuben County woman named her new baby Wyatt Earp.
The Peace Corps was formed in March, and so was the Civilian Conservation Corps.
As we observed last month, February usually begins the maple sugar season, but the sap often keeps on flowing in March. Many producers sell the raw sap, but some process their own, including the folks at Cartwright’s Maple Tree Inn, between Houghton and Angelica. Standing in line on a chilly morning, waiting for pancakes with Cartwright syrup, is a generations-long springtime ritual.
So, shake off the cloudy cloak of winter! Take a stroll around town, (watching out for ice patches). Put on waterproof shoes, and hit the Finger Lakes Trail. The days warm up, and the sun sets later. The drab, tired earth struggles, and then succeeds, to bring forth the first tiny splashes of color. So peek at the neighbors’ streetside flower beds, and see how the bulbs are coming up! Keep your eye peeled for the year’s first robin. Enjoy your March.

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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Meteorologists say it’s March 1, astronomers say it’s March 20. In Vermont, it’s when the crows come back. Or else when the maples put forth their buds and the sap run ends. You boil your last sap down, scour the pans and buckets, and forget the whole thing until February.

*Once upon a time in Rhode Island, the old folks told me long ago, they’d go arbutusing… searching the still-barren land for the early arbutus blossoms, pushing through the snow and the leaves.

*It’s not as elegant, but it also happens when the skunk cabbage rises from wet streaks in the still-frozen bogs. The willow shoots green up. The robins return. When I was young, it was new clothes for Easter. Nowadays it’s the Cadbury Eggs and peanut butter eggs in the store. For a century or more, it’s been the Burpee Seed Catalog in the mail.

*School kids swapped coats for jackets, put the sleds and skates away, and ferreted out the softball bats. The calendar became a matter of intense interest, because summer suddenly didn’t seem too far away.

*Walt Whitman said that to him, ever-returning spring meant “scent of lilac, lowering star in the west, and thought of him I love.” In Bible days, it was the time when kings go forth to war, but it was also the time when the singing of birds has come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.

*Chaucer heard the birds of “Aprille” too… the smale foweles maken melodye.” Today we rejoice when we see our first robin.

*When I was a kid, it was time to gather some early blooms, and hang a May basket on someone’s door.

*What (and when) is spring to us, here in the southern Finger Lakes as we approach the third decade of the 20th century?

*When my wife walks or drives on Haverling Street and County Road 13, she knows every bed of bulbs for a mile or so out past the Bath village limits. Snowdrops, crocuses, tulips and irises come in on different schedules, so spring unfolds for her like page after page of a book.

*Spring to our cat is the time when the windows come open again, and STAY open pretty consistently, at least until the sun goes down. And through those open windows, both he and we hear the spring peepers in the little pond across the road.

*For me, spring means that Mossy Bank Park overlooking Bath opens its gate again, and the eagles return to their nest. Round-lobed hepatica appears on the Finger Lakes Trail, and trout lily later on. Soon the Canada goose couples will lead forth lines of goslings. Juncos shift to elevations that are higher, even if only by a few yards. If you live in the countryside you take down the bird feeders, for a bird feeder is also a bear feeder.

*One day, the world has butterflies again.

*In Hammondsport, Penn Yan, and Watkins Glen, visitors will take seats at sidewalk tables. *When the snow and ice are gone from the shaded clefts, Watkins Glen State Park will open the trails again. Youth groups and others will start laying plans to build floats for the Dairy Parade. Choirs practice Easter anthems. Those who observe the solemn season of Lent see it coming to a close, ushering in a season of joy.

*Disc golfers make their way around the course at Hickory Hill Camping Resort, scraping the rust from skills that have lain unused through the long winter. Orion sinks lower, the Summer Triangle creeps up higher. Spring has come.

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.