This month I’m looking forward to:
- the gradual disappearance of snow and ice cover from local fields and streams (and driveways)
- the appearance of open, flowing water in local streams
- the arrival of ducks, geese, swans and sandhill cranes at the Sunrise river marshes in Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area
- the emergence of skunk cabbage in local wetlands
- the return of at least some migratory song birds
- a shift from mostly cloudy to mostly sunny skies(?)
- baking Irish soda bread in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day
- longer evening’s after March 11
- the arrival of more daylight than dark
- average minimum daily temperatures staying above freezing (maybe not until April 1)
- the start of mud season
- getting out and walking and watching and smelling and listening
 |
| by mid- or late March this year?
Photo by J. Harrington
|
I spent this morning clearing an inch plus of snow from the driveway for the third time in the past five days. It’s time, and past time, for winter to exit, stage left. March brings one of the more significant transitions in our seasons. By month’s end I hope to have seen the end of icicles until next February.
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.
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