We wake up one morning in March to a soft rain and birdsong and the greener grass, and we don't need CNN to tell us a new era has come.
There is life in the withered field and the bare twigs, and the days shall not be as they have been.
It's been happening by degrees, of course -- the florets of goldenrod and asters alive under the snow, the fiddleheads of ferns rolled tight in their sheaths under a mache of last year's leaves ready to rise (shown in May), buds on the trees waiting to swell -- yet it seems sudden, and we realize that is because we haven't been paying attention: change never stops.
Scattered islands of snow remain in these mountains, especially on the north-facing slopes of woods, and against them where the drifts were deepest. Steam rises there, seen against the wet black trunks. We hear the robins peep (they do not arrive with song) and the blackbirds gurglee, and most thrilling of all, the bluebirds trill, and it makes the world more habitable.
Music encourages life. Thoreau imagined birdsong awakens the green world.
"These notes of the earliest birds seem to invite forth vegetation," he wrote in his journal in 1858. "No doubt the plants concealed in the earth hear them and rejoice. They wait for this assurance."
It is as if we never heard them before.
"Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence... reminiscences of our sanest hours.
"The voice of nature is always encouraging."
copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved
