Spring Update
March, 2005

March is middling time: the in-between month of mud. Mud settles on the edge, a mix of earth and water, surf and sand. These days we stand on the fringe between winter and spring with mild days and frigid nights, our heads dreaming of the future while our feet stand mired in the past. On the edge of such fluctuation is mud, the ubiquitous stuff of spring: having lost her ermine coat, Nature stands barren and brown, stripped and saturated as she waits, pregnant, for the green stampede that will be spring.

Our remaining piles of snow are shrinking, subliming into the cold, dry air, but it’s too early--and by night too cold--for wildflowers. This time of year feels bare, as if the curtain has parted before Nature is completely dressed, her nakedness a shock to those who remember her summer verdure. When our northern greenery erupts in May, it will arrive in a sudden torrent, subsuming the earth in choking fecundity. But in the meantime, in March and April--those cruelest months--we grow familiar with mud, Nature’s bare, barren flesh. This time of year, the in-between season, feels more brutal than the height of winter when Nature had at least the modest shelter of snow.

Yet something is stirring. The grass hasn’t yet heard the pulse of spring, lying dormant and dead, trampled in mud and blanched by cold like last year’s straw. The grass hasn’t awoken, but the tentative leaf-tips of crocus hear something as they sprout from the dead earth as unnaturally as plastic bouquets blooming in cemeteries. Yes, the leaves of crocus hear something calling, even if it’s only the fervent prayers of their human caretakers: bloom, please, and soon.

The birds sense something is stirring beneath March mud. Last week I heard house finches singing for the first time this year, their bubbling torrent joining the chorus of cardinals and chickadees which have been chirruping their spring songs for weeks. The robins are back as are the turkey vultures; yesterday I heard the first killdeer crying, and today the first red-winged blackbird. Unlike plants which sprout and bloom irretrievably, unable to turn back once they’ve begun to emerge, birds trickle northward gradually: here a robin, there a goose. If the gradually warming weather takes a turn, early birds can retreat; early-blooming flowers aren’t as adaptive, baring cells irrevocably to spring’s petulant fluctuation.

Today is Good Friday, and I walked through the afternoon slanting sun at the airport, a place of wide sky and long shadow. The red-winged blackbirds were singing--finally--and a brace of wood ducks flew overheard, keening. This time of year, such birds return to hearten the hopes of those who doubt spring’s eventual arrival; this time of year, Christ is planted like a seed in the soil of Palestine, cowering cold in a cave for three nights. Good Friday is the heart of the Triduum, those cruel, middling days when God lies dead. Discouraged, our faith trampled and dirtied, we muddle through mud season, the weeks on end that lack winter’s pristine, crystalline chill or summer’s vivid verdure. Winter-weary, we grapple with doubt, questioning whether Nature like God is gone for good, planted in mud like a rotten seed.

Wearing her tired, trampled nakedness like a scar, her muddy side oozing like a wound, Earth lies stripped and bloodied, vulnerable to the impress of even the most careful foot. We tread lightly during these middling days lest the suck of mud subsume our spirits, its wet, insistent tug nearly as irresistible as the allure of eventual spring. The vanguard leaves of crocus are braver than I am, for I’ve avoided the woods because of mid-March mud. Venturing out my front door is daring enough, the path from door to car being peppered with soggy paw-prints and squishy boot tracks. The grass is dead and mashed; it looks like it will never recover from such a thorough trampling. Yet I know that when spring truly arrives--when the spring sun begins to shine in earnest--the grass will find a sudden leafy firmness, leaping like sprung steel from the ground, nothing able to stem the furor of its unfurling, reborn.

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