A beautiful light in the late afternoon glows in the windows today (Saturday, March16), making me desire to go back outdoors and stare at the world. We have already done a good deal of staring, and looking, and traipsing around in the Blue Hills Reservation today, catching the park in one of its late season undressings.
Change is underway. Last week's snow cover has largely melted into once frozen ground, offering slush and some mud-season conditions on what are otherwise clear and well trod paths from the blows of thousands of feet over scores of years.
Now the feet must rest, even as the eyes may go on feasting.
Today's date means we're halfway through the month of March, that most changeable of moons, given its folklorish status as both lion and lamb. How about lollipop? If the crocuses pop open. Lamplight night-owl? If the longer light, seriously extended by early daylight savings tempts you to stay up later.
I heard an owl hoot from a very nearby tree after midnight one night last week. Though I have never seen one in this neighborhood.
March is the month of first green shoots. Crocuses, blade-like leaves, then budding mouths nuzzling up between the shoots.
Of forsythia's yellow, and pale willow green. Of -- when the ice clears out of the drenched forest lowlands -- the sharply fragrant skunk cabbages. Wild, prolific, and done in a month.
Of bulging, red buds on the slim branchings and tiny twigs of spring-blooming trees. Of the newspaper photos of cherry tree blossoms looming pink and white on fruit trees in the states south of New England. Especially, it seems in the nation's capital (did Jefferson plant these?), if all the blushing pink in the world has not been consumed by the faces ceaselessly embarrassing themselves in the White House and the Capitol building.
March is
the season of wind, such as the sudden blast crossing the back garden from north to sough, and then west to
east, in the midst of this extravagantly sunlit afternoon. The season of bird song too, or does my memory deceive me? A few years back I would have sworn that the dawn serenades of the returning, and seasonally reviving, avian chorus were loudest in March. Their instincts are roused by the stronger, longer sunlight, the warming bare ground of the new year's revelation, and by the springlike temperatures.
Temperatures, we're told, are typically averaging in the low to mid forties by these middle days of the month. Bare ground?
I am remembering Marches with no snow on the ground; recent calendars, however. have banished these vernal expectations. Last year the month gifted us with four consecutive visitations of the fierce storms we called northeasters, because that's the direction from which the
wind blows strongest on this coast. We were coming home
from Florida during one of these on a flight I greatly feared would be canceled. Is this a sign? I asked myself then. Should we not be coming home from Florida to face all this?
And then a few years before, the legendary Massachusetts killing winter of 2015, when the snows of late winter rolled steadily through March. And the snow embankments were scarcely off the earth through the month of April. Fat chance for the crocuses; and the daffodils were similarly late as well.
This year, after a remarkably snow-free winter. we get our only substantial snowfall in the first third of March, fifteen inches in our town of Quincy. Those fortification-like snowbanks once more lining the streets of the neighborhood. The snowed-in, street-parked cars. The heavy coatings of wet snow melting with thumps off all the branches of all the trees, and sliding off the roofs, days later, with brief avalanche-like frenzies.
This is the snow (pictured in the second and third photos above) we found in the Blue Hills Reservation, where we walked last weekend through boot-trodden trails of slush-heavy snow. It had already melted some by then, but you can see it covering the entirely of the broad plain of Houghton's Pond, and on the untouched snowfields where the tree boles and their long straight shadows cross-hatch the earth's white floors.
This week 'seasonable' temperatures melted back most of the snowbanks; and a rainy night decreased them further still.
The birds (as pictured below) accommodated themselves to a snowy floor and looked for the uneaten seeds spilled from the feeder. And the skies grew rich with the deep blue of the fast-approaching equinox.
This week, I think, we will see some of those green sprouts. When it comes, this long-awaited deliverance, the change is always sudden. (Photos below are now-and-then moments from various stages of snow and melt delivered by the stop-and-start seasons of March.)
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