Two winds, and March

Last night there were two winds, and we were like Janus, facing two directions. One came from winter, bitter and cold and driving. The other so intoxicatingly warm, gentle - almost humid. It was a May breeze, ahead of April and March all at once. We must have been on the edge of a front, though I felt on the edge of time itself.

It seems like a sneaking, tripping allowance, an indulgence. A great gasp of YES when weather and time stand firmly in two places at once. This is the truth of it, always, but to be so bold about it is startling and exciting. Oh yes, contradiction! To stand outside of the linear, to dwell in the great embracing paradox!

It stops the story, at any rate. The temptation to categorize and narrate, in order that we understand ourselves more exactly and logically. “It is winter, still, just below freezing but soon the buds will swell.” But here there are leaves on the shrubs, and there on the north side the ground is still covered in ice. My mother saw the redwing blackbirds, but jays still call like they own the place.

I suppose the greater trajectory is still linear, overall, and these patterns are reassuring (the fact that it’s all shifting to ‘sooner’ and ‘warmer’ is alarming, indeed). They provide the solid ground, the background landmarks by which we measure our progress. We locate ourselves through the temporal, meteorological myths and memories of our landscapes.

But ‘both at once’ is precious, and perhaps that’s the greatest gift of March, the infamously fickle month. It’s not fickle, though, it’s honest. It’s bitter and gentle and warm and wet and windy and freezing. There are snowbirds and robins and flowers and ice storms. And on walks with two winds I don’t feel so out of place, myself.

sugaring and snowdrops

Though it's been an odd (non)winter, most New Englanders with buckets and spiles and maples are sugaring about now. The consensus is that it won't be a great year - either sap flow will be low (there isn't enough of a temperature difference, and therefore pressure difference, to encourage flow), or the sugar content will be poor. Sugar maples need a good, long, hard freeze in order to set up their loads of carbohydrates for pre-photosynthesis spring growth. So, there's a bit of wariness that goes into tapping, but we're still doing it.

We tapped six trees today; all of them big enough for just one bucket. There are a few we left alone, due to breakage from the Halloween storm. We won't have a lot of syrup, just a taste. But the sound of sap dripping into those chapeau'd buckets is invaluable. It sounds like spring and melt and thaw itself. And what's just as exciting is looking down at the leaf litter, and seeing snow drops bursting up like Bo Peep's shepherd's crook. So, the first bulbs are up. They mean a lot, those harbingers. 'To early bulbs' is from a couple of years ago, while I was up in northern Vermont...

In Winter I said in closing,

As a simple kind of balm,

(quote) It will all come up

Roses, before too long.

But here I am, here’s Spring,

And there are no roses.

They are still thorn and bud, far

Behind the maples and lilacs, even.

They are shut closed tight I am

Like the windy spaces between

Stems, without leaves.

– just not yet, and so

No there are no roses.

But here, snowdrops bending

Reverent heads, crocuses come

Brightly and, oh gratitude, daffodils.

intergenerational scratch and sniff

Every Thursday morning I make my way to the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton, Mass, to spend a few hours with other volunteer environmental educators in the area. As one might expect, the majority of our group is made up of women, age 65 and older, though there are a few of us younger than that, and a couple of wonderful retired men. We plan for upcoming events, whether it’s a group of fifth graders coming to learn about winter adaptations, or preparing for Big Night, an event centered on vernal pools (involving salamander costumes and luminaria).

I go to help with all of these things, as well as to meet the network of educators in my area. But I’ve found that I go, now, for the unique and decidedly rare companionship of an older generation.

These volunteers are extraordinary. One is a naturalist specializing in scat, one edits physics textbooks “in her spare time” and is a walking botanical dictionary. One has been pivotal in thirty years of forestry research around the Quabbin resevoir. Every single one is kind, humble, caring, and insatiably inquisitive. Together it makes quite the educational and nourishing group. I find myself bolstered and restored, as well as dumbfounded as to how infrequently I connect with a wide range of ages – and how essential it is.

Today was winter twig identification, an opportunity after all our work was done to tackle that tricky art. I learned beech buds (huge and golden and pointed) are fusiform, or bullet-shaped. Although one woman did say they look like old hand-rolled cigars. Shagbark hickory buds are shaggy themselves, and, like ash, enormous as they contain whole compound leaves. Basswood buds look like they’ve just been to the salon, all gussied up in a shiny red, and silver maple (believe it or not) sprouts whole clusters of round, red buds that look like flowers themselves. We had a group epiphany realizing what we thought was a white ash twig was actually a Norway maple – the lack of a ‘smiling’ leaf scar gave it away. Eureka! We also realized its growth in one season – over a foot – made more sense for the invasive Norway maple than for the ailing ash.

But my favorite lesson was the black (or sweet) birch, Betula lenta. It’s a bit hard to distinguish from cherry, each alternate with noticeable lenticels (little breathing speckles) and small, reddish, pointy buds. So you have to scratch and sniff. Here we are, a group of daughters and grandmothers, with our noses to twigs. If you sense something like rotten almonds, that’s cherry. Wintergreen, ah! Black birch. Yellow (B. allegheniensis) will do the same, but its golden bark gives it easily away.

Every week I feel a sense of relief, a righting of the order of things. Life is for learning, and what wells of wisdom and knowledge are those who’ve come before. I wasn’t taught this, not really. Respect? Yes, of course. But not real veneration. Perhaps because most or all of our disciplines are those of discovery … what is new and young is what is trusted – in technology, medicine, even philosophy. This is not wrong, of course, but it’s not all.

I can read my field guides, but I trust even more the woman who has watched her witch hazel bud, flower, and fruit for fifty years. There is no substitute for time and loving attention, and I must learn to ask more questions, instead of demanding my own mastery, which is nowhere near ripe.

a new wind

There is a new wind tonight. She is born of mud and crack and thaw, on the heels of sunlit last snow. Usually she first whispers in March, but the sap is running now in early February and I’ve already heard someone say “snowdrops.” So, the bulbs and the buds and the wind have it.

Winter wind cracks and whips, it is more force than voice. It is hollow, sharp, and fierce. On a dark January night it catches us, snaps at us, and then leaves us staring at stark stars, everything sharpened. It does not linger in its work.

But the wind tonight was speaking, with chill enough to hone and brighten, but now with character. It is beginning to be laden, as now there are bits of the world to carry, opening. Soon galls and buds will release; the machinery is at work. The stew is stirring. It won’t be long now before skunk cabbage, those alien claws that seem to exhume themselves.

This year’s turning of seasons is dipped in unease, come too early and earned too easily. But tonight’s wind, and the moonlit river, and that first smell of grass can’t be written off. They speak too softly, are too lovely, and move us too deeply and deftly. We are grasped, gladly lured into another brimming turn.

there is nothing like it

There is nothing like a crow flying

Against a pale blue dawn sky,

That blueyellowwhite canvas –

Inky feathered brushes combing its distinction.

And there is nothing like the morning crescent moon

Low, forty-five degrees above the tip

Of a cedar, exquisite composition.

The asymmetry! I say, but it’s the

Astonishing lack, without design

Or beyond it, that makes it heartwrenching

And perfect.

Like these bits of myself and eras,

The caverns and peaks.

All this perhapsandstartling

Beauty,

as it is.