Spring reveal

Sign of Spring: Finding what was lost. 

The snow that fell ten days ago was wet and heavy, and I worked up a sweat as I shoveled it. Each shovelful had to be lifted to the very top of our four-foot snowbanks — high enough that the shoveled snow would not slide back down onto the sidewalk. 

The temperature hovered around freezing and I was becoming uncomfortably warm. I took off my hat to cool down. Five minutes later, off came my knit mittens. I unzipped my coat and kept shoveling. 

Still too hot, so I peeled off the jacket, and threw that on our front steps with everything else.

After shoveling, I gathered up my sweaty outwear and took it inside. 

Only, I was a kitten missing a mitten, as I found out the next morning.

I went outside and scanned the sidewalk and snowbanks. Hmm, a fine job of shoveling, but not a mitten did I glimpse. 

I looked the next day, and the next day, too. How frustrating. I liked those mittens. They are blue-gray and match my jacket. 

I admit, I like certain things to match.

"Where is it? Who would take one mitten?" I complained to my husband. "One mitten is no use." 

Was it someone who had also lost a right-hand mitten, and had been just waiting to find one to replace it? 

Maybe some Golden Retriever had picked it up, and merrily carried it away as a prize? (You know how they are.) 

Why hadn't I checked that I had everything before I went inside? How could I lose a mitten in my own front yard? I was filled with self-recriminations. Yes, over a mitten. 

After a week of this, I gave up on my dreams of recovering my lost mitten, and ordered a new pair.

I should have known. Today, Spring pulled back the edges of Winter's icy pantaloons to reveal a very sodden and icy mitten, on the front steps. Where it had sunk into the snowy edges. 

Surprise! Winter trickster strikes again.

It is only March 21. Winter is not yet done with his surprises. 

People often talk about "balance" on the equinox because for one day, we have equal times of light and dark. Then somehow that all gets mixed up with spring, which is not a balance at all but a transitioning between the season of not-growing and the season of growing. When it comes to seasonal transitions, or life transitions, there is no balance; more of a balancing.

By no means does spring (or any other season) "begin" at any specific time, much less one day. This is important to note; because if your region is not springlike on the first day of spring, you know it is best not to be literal about these things.

And also there are clearly more than four seasons. Let's look at the meme lore regarding springtime. The seasons following upon winter that we call "spring" actually progress something like this: "Late first winter." "Fool's spring." "Second winter." "Spring of deception." "Third winter." "Mud season." "Actual spring." 

Fool's spring, the time I suspect we are in right now, is also known as early spring. Plenty of snow on the ground, melting around the edges. See-sawing between fresh, blue days and cold, gray ones.  

The robins, cardinals and red-winged blackbirds, however, are convinced that it is a good-enough spring for them. 

The birds do not wait for a better, springier spring to come along, they get on with it. As always, they know there is no time to waste. Sing now! Mate now! Live now! 

CHERT! CHERT! proclaims the red-winged blackbird beside the marsh. We are alive, and the time is now. 

Needless to say (but I will say it anyway), animals don't have time for bewailing what can't be helped. Instead, they get on with living, regardless of snow, gray skies or less than ideal circumstances. 

What if you thought of any circumstance as ideal? All the circumstances in which you are alive. 

Now, for instance.

That feels like a winged thought, a way of living fit for birds and humans. Even now, hundreds of miles away, the warblers and monarch butterflies are taking wing, migrating north over this vast continent. 

They're coming, it's happening, just hold on.  

 

What once was marshland remembers

I was born under a Water sign, and live in a watery place encircled by lakes, wetlands, a creek and two rivers. 

As a young girl I learned how to swim in the waters of this lake. I did not know then that this was, and still is, a sacred place, where wild rice once grew freely, as a gift to all who would gather it. Where wild, shallow marshlands offered a home for herons and a gathering ground for humans who were here long before my ancestors came to this continent. 

When I was young, mowed turf grass ran down to the lake's barren shores. Once a marsh, with liminal margins, the lake then had an artificially neat edge. It was intended entirely for the use of people, not any wild inhabitants. The plants that had for centuries lived in relationship with the marshy shores were mostly gone. Wildness didn't belong at an urban lake of that era. It was at best an inconvenience, and at worst a threat. 

Fifty years on, frogs at this same lake sing loudly in the springtime. They chorus from dense stands of young willows, habitat for the frogs that also protect the the shoreline from erosion and help filter pollutants from the water. Turtles nest on the sandy beaches. Great blue herons stalk the shoreline under dangling willow fronds, and bald eagles circle high overhead, fishing. 

Now, the waters are allowed to find the shape they want to become...to flood at will into adjacent marshy pools thick with reeds and frog songs, where red-winged blackbirds can weave their nests amid the deep tangle of cattails and sedges. 

And fifty years later, I am thankful to have gained some understanding of what a living lake is, and how it may be abused or ignored or cared for and treasured by the people and culture that surround it.

When I think about this place, I feel gratitude that these waters and lands that I love were always cared for and honored by the Native peoples. They were still honored and remembered for generations after the people were displaced and robbed of their sacred homelands.

I am also thankful for the wise minds in recent history that are allowing wildness to return, even a small degree, to these public lands. Allowing them to be who they are, to do the work they were created to do.

I want to remember that these waters, and all waters — even in the midst of a city — are living and ancient, and that they remember.

That the land I walk on remembers its ancient past as marshland, savanna, prairie, woodland. 

That the land also remembers the original peoples who listened to hear its voice...the people with whom  it lived in deep, reciprocal relationship for millennia.

I want to believe that if I sing to the waters, speak and listen to them, chant my thanks and feel their liquid touch upon my skin, that they may someday carry a memory of this woman, as well.

I want to believe that my deepest self, like the marshlands, will always remember who I am; always return me to my essential wild shape — to the person I was made to be in this life.