Spring Happens, But Slowly

There is a day when spring comes. You can sense it; the way the sun slants through the blinds in the morning and calls you outside. You feel a certain warmth on the breeze that hasn’t been there for months. Streams are fuller. Bird songs are slightly more urgent and the birds busier. You realize you are overdressed and should have left a layer or two behind. It is that day when you know for certain winter is over and spring has arrived, and even a foot of snow the next day can’t convince you that it hasn’t. This year, in this small corner of the world, that day was Monday, March 6th. It was a day when I went out and wanted to never go back in. The day the madness called spring fever took hold.

Spring often comes silently. Hushed and just barely noticeable. Snow melt happens not on the surface but lower down where the snow contacts the soil, and you see it happening by looking at the streams and rivers, not at the snow. We had a storm drop about six and a half inches of wet, heavy snow two days before I took this shot, but it is melting fast. When snow is as wet as this was it is little more than white rain, so it doesn’t usually last long unless we get more on top of it.

This is what I saw when I looked out the kitchen window the morning of the day spring came. These blue shadows always remind me of my art teacher Mrs. Safford, who taught me to see them. Shadows can be gray and that’s what I saw, but they can also be blue and that’s what she taught me to see. Blue shadows in a painting of a winter scene gave it much more interest she said, and so I painted blue shadows. (Which sometimes turned out to be purple.) It’s all in the light, she would say, and that’s when I started to look at light and how it fell. I can draw a ball, but without shadow it is just a circle. Shadow is what makes it a sphere, and shadow is what makes this life so very interesting.

This shot has absolutely nothing to do with this post but it shows a cloud and its shadow. I’ve loved watching cloud shadows move over the land since I was a very young boy but this was the first time I had seen both the shadow and the cloud from this point of view. I could see both the darkness of the shadow and the sunlight falling on the cloud that caused it at the same time. In my mind Joni Mitchell sang “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now” and I realized that, even though I’ve never been on a plane, by climbing mountains I have seen clouds from both sides.

I went to the skunk cabbage swamp again to see what they had been up to. Flourishing, is what they have been up to. This group had melted a nice oval through the snow so it looked like they were a still life with a platter. Leaf buds have appeared and you can also see how thin the snow cover in the swamp is. By now it has most likely all melted.

Here was one I might be able to get a peek into, I thought.

I didn’t want to kneel in the muck and come away from the swamp with soaking wet knees so I got out my small macro camera, bent over and and pointed it at the gap in the spathe. Considering that I was shooting blind it didn’t come out all that bad, so I was pleasantly surprised. You can see how the tiny skunk cabbage flowers dot the spadix, and how the splotchy outer spathe protects it all. The flowers were shedding pollen and I had seen a few insects about, so maybe this will be the year that I finally find a skunk cabbage fruit.  

The beautiful curl at the tip of a cinnamon fern’s leaf tip grabbed at my attention for a bit. Everything seems to spiral.

I had a look at some wild azalea buds while I was in the swamp. They are also called wooly or early azaleas and they’ll bloom toward the end of May with some of the most beautiful, most fragrant flowers found in the forest. To stumble upon a seven foot tall bush full of beautiful pink flowers off in the middle of nowhere is to know what it means to be stunned into silence. These moments of awe can happen when we look off from a mountain top or when we look at the ice on a puddle in spring; anytime, anywhere. Everything is simple in the forest, uncomplicated and beautiful. There is a gentle, silent serenity found there, evident in all things, and it is there that I fell in love with life so many years ago.

I don’t look at red or silver maple buds until spring is near because when I do they make me wish spring was nearer. When I looked at this group of buds I could see that the bud scales, though they hadn’t fully opened, were loosening their grip on the buds. Everything in nature including myself, kind of sighs and relaxes when spring gets here.

I always tell people that it doesn’t matter how many times they walk through a place. If they walk slowly through nature and look closely they’ll almost always see something new, and that proved true on this day when I found an elm branch sticking up out of a snowbank. I’ve walked here many hundreds of times and have never noticed the young elm tree I’ve been walking right by. The tree might be 10 or 12 years old but it’s doubtful that it will get much older. At one time Keene was called the Elm City because of the beautiful old elms that lined the streets, but in the 1960s they started to die off from Dutch elm disease and had to be cut down. From then on finding a 200 year old elm has been rare event, but I do know where a few are, scattered here and there.  

It’s a bit odd that the smooth bud scales of striped maple can open to such velvety buds, but hairy or not they’re beautiful in varying shades of orange and pink. The bud scales have their own beauty; they always look like they’ve been sanded and polished.

I couldn’t resist showing those who might be new here what the bud scales in that previous shot will open to reveal; some of the most beautiful buds in these spring woods. Anyone who says that magic doesn’t happen in the forest hasn’t been in the woods in spring. That’s when the real magic happens.

Someone found out the ground was thawing, the hard way. I don’t think the frost went very deep into the ground this year because winter was relatively mild, so mud season shouldn’t be too challenging in this area. Still, most towns in the area will impose a weight limit of 6 tons on all gravel and other roads susceptible to damage. Food, fire and heating oil trucks are an exception, but all logging and heavy delivery trucks will have to sit idle until May first.

If you look closely you can see buds on these daffodils.

The spring blooming witch hazels are still going strong. They might go for a month or more depending on the weather. I think they’d rather have cool than hot because it seems to me that they bloom longer.

Crocuses shrugged off the snow and said no thanks, it’s spring.

Some did anyway. These yellow ones were still trying to bloom under the snow.

The crocus plants I’ve shown here grow on the campus of the local college, which at its essence is a huge mass of concrete and brick. This mass absorbs heat from the sun during the day and releases it slowly at night so plants are coddled in a way, and they tend to bloom slightly earlier than they would elsewhere. This shot is of the same yellow crocuses that appeared in the previous shot, taken about 24 hours later, and it shows how fast the snow is melting on the campus.

I decided to walk around and see if I could find any other flowers blooming on the campus. I remembered where there was a large bed full of purple and yellow crocuses. When I got there I saw that some of  the yellows were out but there was no sign of the purples. Once it starts it moves quickly, so I’ll have to go back tomorrow and check again.

Most of the yellow flowers had red (or orange) in the center but this one didn’t. It didn’t matter, it was still beautiful.

The big excitement on this day came in the form of dandelions. Call them what you want, I call them wildflowers, and there were several of them soaking up the sunshine. Their appearance is a signal, so now I’ll watch for the blossoms of spring cress, ground ivy, henbit and violets.

Blossom by blossom the spring begins. ~Algernon Charles Swinburne

Thanks for coming by.