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The
first sign—the first
faint hint that winter won’t last forever—happens at the thistle feeder by
the kitchen window on the second floor of the old farmhouse. The small birds
who spend the winter here use the huge apple tree nearby as their staging area
for the feeder, flitting back and forth, often emptying the feeder in less
than a day. When the weather is cold and dingy outside, the raspberry-stained
purple finches and the rosy house finches brighten things up. The goldfinch,
on the other hand, is not gold at all. The summer sun-bright male dresses
down in winter to match the female’s olive-gray plumage, a plumage most often
described as drab in the birding books. But in late February, while the farm
is shrouded in white, there is a slight change in the male goldfinch’s
feathers. The drab isn’t quite so drab anymore. I can’t see the yellow that
will make this fellow look canary-like by May, but I can feel it. He exudes
an aura, a color on his breast that is not-yet-yellow but is, without doubt,
the-anticipation-of-yellow.
A
week or so later a
red-winged blackbird appears at the feeder. His red-and-yellow epaulets defy
the surrounding grayness. He has probably wintered over not too far south,
perhaps in Pennsylvania. Once the snow is gone and the cattails begin to grow
he’ll look for a nesting site on the marshy edge of the pasture. Last fall
the redwings formed huge flocks that settled like black beads on the branches
of the trees in the hedgerow. All of a sudden they would rise up out of the
tree, many as one, and fly back and forth in a strange undulating mass,
unified in their apparent indecision about which way to go.
These
first avian alerts
are easy to doubt. The goldfinch’s breast only awaits the arrival of yellow.
The red-winged blackbird delivers a slash of yellow on his shoulders, but he
could have miscalculated and come north to our feeder too early.
The
next sign is
unmistakable. After three days of moderate March weather, the yellow faces of
the coltsfoot appear where snow has melted on the side of the road. She hurls
her bright head up through the tired dirty brown leaves, so impatient that
she forgets to bring her green arms with her. Coltsfoot likes neglected
places, roadsides, poor soil, rural slopes where people have dumped their
trash. Every year the unruly roadside coltsfoot competes with the more
dignified snowdrops and crocuses in my garden for the first bloom. The
snowdrops usually win, but the coltsfoot almost always beats out the more
composed crocuses.
Next,
the peepers. I get
into the car after work. It’s warm from the sun, so I roll down the window.
As I pass the old cornfield on Route 9 the sound is unmistakable—high
pitched, ringing, almost like sleigh bells, it hovers over the sound of the
traffic. These tiny frogs, proclaiming we have not been abandoned to the icy
fist, appear as soon as the temperature begins to stay above freezing at
night and there is open water in the fields. With a peeper, hearing is
believing, for seeing is impossible. For several years, I armed myself with a
flashlight and stalked peepers on warm spring nights. Every time I moved into
the sound, hoping to sneak up on them, they did their disappearing act. I was
surrounded by a deafening chorus, with no peepers in sight. A full orchestra
suddenly became a needle in a haystack. I have seen only one peeper in my
life. I found him on a leaf-covered path while hiking on a chilly day. He was
the color of the brown leaves, only an inch long, and had the unmistakable X
on his back. Hyla crucifere. Cross bearer. Now, as I drive home from work
late in the day, their ethereal anthem flies upward, affirming the
anticipation of yellow on the goldfinch’s breast, the delivery of yellow by
the red-winged blackbird, and the explosion of the yellow coltsfoot beside
the road.
The
final sign of
deliverance happens in the paddock, where we check the sheep. All winter long
the manure and hay have built up, layer on frozen layer, making the ground
higher and higher. As I lean over to restrain a reluctant ewe my boots sink
into the ground. I can feel the hard layers of straw and manure under the
surface begin to thaw. The ice has given up.
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