Unlike cartoon springtime, which is lush and instant – a character in a doorway rubbing his eyes while flowers unfurl and bluebirds sing – real life springtime is reserved, somber, even painful at first. Like car-crash participants before the adrenaline rush, before the thank-God-for-life part, we start the season by checking for broken bones and asking if everyone’s ok.
The land will be fine, even if at the moment it looks beaten and half-drowned. Around here, snow still lingers in splotchy archipelagos through north-facing sections of forest; it’s like the landscape has psoriasis. In the meadows, the snow has long since retreated to reveal rich browns and the year’s first greens. Soon the grasses will be lush enough that the earth itself will be an afterthought, a novelty seen only in the wake of a farmer’s plow, but at the moment this same earth seems vulnerable. You can see it beneath a dead layer of plant matter like a scalp beneath thinning hair. It wounds easily. Ragged muddy gashes from tires and feet bleed, then clot, then bleed again.
The toll that winter’s winds, ice, and snow exacted on trees is readily apparent, as the forest floor is littered with branches. Look up and see great white tears where limbs were ripped from their boles; broken crowns where tree neighbor battered tree neighbor like Pacquiao vs. Clottey. In this shadow spring, the Lorax has given up activism to become a mediator between warring tree factions.
Here in central Vermont, the animal contingent seemed to make it through alright. After two years of heavy snowpack, the deer were granted a reprieve. Yesterday on a walk, I passed a flock of 16 turkeys – 10 hens, 2 toms, and 4 jakes. Both toms were all hot and bothered and the jakes looked like they wanted to be, even if they were just grasping what the job entailed. The marshes are full of willow blossoms and “oakaree”, and the air just reeks of beaver castor. As I write this, I’m watching a robin hop cheerfully on the lawn outside the office, pulling torpid worms from the earth with a ferocity that borders on sadistic.
How the human part of the natural world fared the winter is always more complicated to get a bead on. The two sugarmakers on staff are feeling disappointed and whiplashed. Any hope for a late-season run should be killed by the 80 degree temperatures they’re calling for this weekend. I don’t know if you northern folks are faring any better.
People in general are trying to re-prime their emotional pumps, trying to cast off four months of winter and get on with their lives, trying to match their outward disposition to the theological/artistic/poetic themes of rebirth and hope and renewal that are the standard, after all.
With any luck, most of us, save for a few scratches, made it through the wreck in one piece.
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