Spring at a Gallop
The foot-plus of snow from two weeks ago feels like a memory of a trip to a different place. Some early-sprouting cosmos suffered from the winter storm – we’re waiting to see if they will bounce back – but everything else seems fine. When the receding snow uncovered the daffodil shoots, they looked unfazed. There was a small snow-free cylinder of space around each one – maybe the heat of the earth wicked up to the shoots and melted the snow, making a little daffodil snow cave? The forecasted historically low temperatures turned out to be another weatherperson’s false promise. If it did get into the twenties, it happened when everything was covered with snow, which provided an insulating blanket against the damaging cold. Some of the daffodils were also under the grass and leaf mulch we spread last fall. When uncovered, the shoots were yellow. After a few days of light, they start to green from the bottom up (not sure why – chlorophyll doesn’t come from the roots, so it can’t be the same reason that the celery stalks change in the memorable elementary school experiment). At the moment they look like rainbow popsicles, but with kale flavor at the bottom and banana at the top. There are also naturalized daffodils coming up here and there on the lawn; one needs to be careful not to step or roll the cart over them.
Early spring signs abound. Some examples:
- Light. In the morning, in the evening - three and a half more minutes each day; two and a half more hours on March 1 than on a day in dark December.
- The frog chorus rising from the wetlands. The frog song sounds like a sheep’s bleat, but in a slightly lower register and mellower. They sing in groups. I don’t know the typical size, but it’s enough to create a constant thrum. It is heard all over the island. People like it. It really gets going at night; we envision it as a kind of party. Of a warm, late spring evening, we’ll need to raise our voices to be heard above it when walking by an active patch.
- The weeds, the first being the ones I call ‘poppers’. They seem to appear, flower, and form seed pods in a matter of days. The pods are spring loaded. They wait for something to brush them, at which point they explode, sending seeds in all directions. After years of dealing with them, I looked up the name. It is appropriately unappealing: Hairy Bittercress. (I searched for “popping weed” and made an inadvertent discovery: popping, crackling and sparking marijuana is a thing.)
- T-shirt weather. This depends on the weather, yes, but also on the type of work that’s to be done. When it’s something vigorous like bed digging, then upper forties and barely a breeze (like today) is enough to support baring the elbows. There were hardly any goosebumps (I did keep my cap on).
Many changes, but I wish some things would change faster. Early spring germination is a slow process. I find myself anxiously watching over seed beds, wondering whether the sprouts will show. I feel like Toad of the classic story, wanting to yell at them. I was the same way with our kids when they were babies, waiting them to reach the milestones laid out in the child development book. I still haven’t learned to trust the process, to learn what Toad learned (in the words of Elvis Perkins):
While you were sleeping your babies grew
The stars shined and the shadows moved
…
They gave us picks said "go mine the sun
And go gold and come back when you're done”.
