This is the time of year that I dearly love. Plant catalogs begin filling my mailbox, extolling the virtues of a new rototiller or the latest daylily cultivar, promising clouds of butterflies or hordes of hummingbirds if I'd only install these plants in my gardens. We've all seen the glossy magazine version of spring: A dish of perfect forced hyacinths, new Easter Sunday dresses, April showers, May flowers. But Spring, Herself, has other ideas: A thunderous downpour that washes away tender lettuce seddlings; a cold northern wind that sneaks in overnight and nips the apple blossoms; maple tree flowers covering my windshield, insisting I scrape them aside like so much cinnamon-colored snow.
For me, the Spring Equinox has always conjured something wild and earthy, restlessly sleeping and undulating just beneath the surface of winter, the promise of magic waiting impatiently to break free. The word vernal conveys a sense of the velvety fur coat of a mountain lion or a wild mushroom nestled beneath of bed of last fall's leaves.
But when does that precise moment of shift from winter to spring occur? When is that exact point where day and night are equal, that subtle instant when it is no longer winter but not yet spring? Certainly the seasons pay no attention to dates on a calendar, any more than the whietail deer makes a mental note to shop for his new spring jacket and antlers to go a-courting. It just happens. Maybe it is in that visceral urge that begins to bubble through our veins, first a tender effervescent trickle, then evolving into a roaring tidal wave, shamelessly shouting, "No more snow! Time to plant the peas! Time to feather the nest!" Now the current is encouraged by the proximity of sun and pull of moon on the tides of sea and breath and blood, the same primal scream that sends salmon to spawn and calls the robins home to nurture a new brood.
Subtlety itself defines the flow of the seasons. An autumn maple tree may shout "look at my glorious fall color!" but there is an underlying pervasive whisper tickling our ears to just listen, begging us to pay attention not only to the large and obvious, but also insisting we acknowlede the minute detail of tadpoles becoming frogs, poppy flowers that last only a few ephemeral hours, a snake slowly shedding its skin, the perfection in an ice crystal. The pussy willow in catkins yesterday has quietly unfurled its succulent new leaves. The grass that was dormant and brown yesterday has grown a foot overnight, demanding to be mown, the grubs and earthworms under that blanket of sod still quite content in their underground chambers. When did that daffodil open? Goldenrod and milkweed languidly stretching tentative shoots in the meadow.
Maybe there is no precise moment. Perhaps the energy of each season comes wrapped in the cloak of its predecessor and successor, unfurling time and again like Matryoshka dolls, waltzing deliriously to the same music for eternal time. In that case, Spring was here all along. She was simply wearing a different dress.
Originally published April 12, 2002
