There is a moment each year when I know the threshold into spring has been crossed. I try not to let it escape me. Sometimes, of course, you only know after the fact. Last year, I caught it over several days. I was reading Gilbert White in a window seat while the white-throated sparrows and flaxen blooms returned to the forsythia. By the time I had finished the book, I had crossed into spring. Letter by letter. Almost imperceptibly.
That was early April.
This year I tried to cross it by reading another old favorite, The Wind in the Willows. But it didn’t hold my attention like it usually does. Perhaps I had tried too early. Spring in New England seldom comes in mid-March. Here she’s liable to sneak past you shrouded in her mantle of April rain.
There is that famous story Wordsworth tells of crossing the Alps. He and Robert Jones had been traveling near Chamouny, and resumed their journey toward the Italian border. The moment of crossing, what should have been a dramatic summit, came and went without fanfare. Only later, when informed by a peasant, did they realize they were already across.
Very little could get past Thoreau’s uncanny vigilance. Once, he detected spring as early as March 8th. On a return journey from Framingham, 1853, he saw it in the ruts of the road:
“On wheels in snow– A spring sheen on the snow– The melting snow running & sparkling down hill in the ruts was quite springlike– The snow pure white but full of water & dissolving through the heat of the sun.”
He continues, living it anew as he writes in his journal, and imagines the sap rising in the trees:
“This is the sap of which I make my sugar after the frosty nights—boiling it down & crystallizing it”1
That, too, is a way of crossing into spring, by taste.
For me, it happened finally and all at once, on the last Thursday in March, as I was returning from the Grolier Bookshop. I had nearly reached home when I passed a small park. Toddlers were being gathered into a line beneath a tall beech. A chill wind rustled the bare twigs above. And higher still, a cloud passed before the sun and suddenly melted all our shadows into mud.
“The sun’s gone,” said a three-year-old.
“But it’s only a cloud,” their shepherd answered.
And then, like the changing of dreams in sleep, the world brightened again, and we all were in a new land.
“See?”
The little troop fell silent at the magic. All gazed backward, their eyes on the playground, its painted iron bars gleaming in a leveling light—all but one girl. She stood with her hand outstretched studying the sunlight on her open palm, a brightness more fragile and fleeting than the hazelnut Dame Julian once held. Passing, I heard her announce, as if to herself, and in the smallest voice, “Spring.”
Thoreau, Journal V: 1852-1853; Princeton Press, 474-475.
Lovely. “The tress that have it in their pent-up buds”— Robert Frost
Beautifully written Adam!