Edward Thomas, month of March from the 1996 Old Farmer’s Almanac, wrote, “Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed / The speculating rooks at their nest cawed, / And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, / What we below could not see. / Winter pass.”
Winter is passing us by…It’s a subtle passing, though. No moment that we can point to that declares winter has finally moved on. That may be some distance yet down the road. I read in the paper just the other day that our spring may be rather cold and wet. Our rains tonight give a certain credence to that forecast.
I saw some of the smaller fish in the pond up in the warm March sun just the other day. Even an imperceptible change in the temperature of the water in our backyard pond was enough to stir them from their winter sleep.
The snowbanks on the boulevard in front of my house seem to have dwindled. Not by a lot, mind you, but just enough to suggest there is melt underway. The brooks and creeks will soon be fast-flowing. Little estuaries that were completely frozen over have lost their ice. You will have to be careful near streams this spring with the snowpack adding to the flow.
“The snowdrops nodded their delicate heads as if calling to her, ‘…winter is over, spring is here.’” an excerpt from Jack and Jill by Louisa May Alcott and featured in the February 2002 issue of Victoria magazine.
My children are impatient for the change, but you can’t rush this passage. It lingers for a while, probably to help us appreciate what’s to come. The roots beneath the soil know the right moment when it will be time to send new shoots up into the warn sun.
Walt Whitman wrote, “Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well, / Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch, / Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn…”
The rose is so patient, enduring the harshest winds of winter, waiting for spring and its chance to bloom again…As Dantesaid. “For I have seen, stiff and sharp, / The thornbush stand all winter long, / Then finally bear a rose upon its top…”
Robert Graves wrote, “She tells her love while half asleep, /In the dark hours, / With half-words whispered low: / As earth stirs in her winter sleep / And puts out grass and flowers / Despite the snow, / Despite the falling snow.”
And when the cold finally retreats in the spring, we rise from the cold ashes of a long winter and life seems to begin again. Maybe, just maybe, that’s why the leaves on the trees in autumn seem to be on fire.
Francis Gay in the 1990 edition of the Friendship Book of Francis Gay quotes an unknown author: “In the heart of every winter is a quivering spring, and behind the veil of each night there is a smiling dawn.”
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Don Jackson
