who speaks for spring?

“Spring is like a perhaps hand,” says e. e. cummings, whose poem of that title goes on to evoke an ethereal jack frost-of-the-spring, lightly and kindly undoing his work. A blush of rose here, a quiet hand quickening the willows to bright gold. The ‘veil of green,’ as my father put it, which appears when buds swell. This image is often used—the maiden of spring – as opposed to the bold, brazen, boisterous matron of summer and harvest. The one with wild hair and twinkling eyes, who produces tomatoes and pumpkins and corn and honey – all things outlandishly fertile. She is delicate spring, come of age and fruitful. Round and rowdy and overflowing.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t felt the abundance of summer in almost a full solar orbit – the feeling that every inch of space is not only alive but brimming – but it seems to me spring is as bright and daring and messy as anything else this year. Snowdrops appeared full and hearty, thrown suddenly amidst dead leaves and hummus. The grass has greened, unabashedly, overnight. There are grackles, blackbirds – the icterids are home. Daffodils don’t coyly lift their heads, blushing with attention, either. They do what they look like they should – they trumpet. The whole world is blaring, just like the crepuscular robins. But that’s for the next entry. Let us say for today that robins (some individuals of which do, in fact, overwinter, changing their diet from worms to berries) are cheerful, evocative, social, and extremely demanding of your attention come dusk. And soon, come four o’clock in the morning.

All this blaring and wild waving of blossoms and beaks makes me doubt the ‘maiden’ idea. It all seems twinklingly sneaky to me, but kind. Maybe spring is a coyote, but she’s wiser than that. The archetypal hag? Clarisa Pinkola Estes is an anthropologist and storyteller, who has championed the wise old woman. She lives in muck and dirt, the edge where things die, only to be transformed. A conjurer of bones, a seamstress of flesh.

There’s a touch of all forms in spring – that is the magic of the ‘edge’ of a season, where you can see all things in one. But when I see the alien purple tentacles of skunk cabbage reach out of the ooze, see the snowdrops bust out of leaves and mud – I hear bright laughter, and something that resembles a happy cackle.