In an unstable world, one truth we can rely on is the arrival of Spring. There are always false signs and bitter setbacks: three weeks ago I returned from a walk with my dog, a morning so warm and promising that I hooked up a garden hose to wash her muddy feet. Today as I sit at my desk searching for words, my thermometer reads 15 degrees, and I’m wondering if my hose will still hold water when it thaws. Three days ago I heard a phoebe, but today the woods are mottled with fresh snow. Robert Frost understood the paradox of Spring:
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.
(from Two Tramps in Mud Time)
April will eventually yield to May, the season will set, and there will be no turning back. It is daylight, scientists remind us, not temperature, that defines our seasons. Between the solstice in March and the first of May we gain more than two hours of nurturing light, but in uncertainty we wait and wait for the arrival of Spring.
When I was a boy, there was no waiting. Spring began the day I retrieved my baseball mitt from the floor of our coat closet and had my first catch of the year. It could happen as early as January, my friend from a few blocks away and I in shirtsleeves, the pop of the ball in our gloves willing the calendar forward. Even as a young man I believed that moment came sooner than I do now, perhaps with the sudden, buttery color in the branches of a willow tree or the hoarse call of a redwing blackbird floating over a riverbank. I was eager and hopeful, easily moved by partial truths.
These days I’m more cautious about signs of Spring (and everything else, for that matter), not doubtful so much as patient, with a watchfulness neither better nor worse than my boyhood innocence or my romanticism as a younger man. It’s just different. I wait for May and a pair of reliable ambassadors – wolf spiders and red trillium – to tell me when Spring is here for good.
First, I look for red trillium on the sides of Taylor Valley Road a few miles from my house, a dirt road where you can run or walk for miles without seeing a house or car. It’s perfect for trillium with deep forest on both sides and a brook on the northern edge to keep the air moist and cool. A day or two after the first flower appears, the roadside explodes with trillium. Our home is surrounded by similar woods, but here trillium is a rare surprise. Last year my granddaughter, nearly five at the time and crazy for flowers, spotted a single blossom on a trail between our houses. The next day my wife walked the trail, and the flower had disappeared. A few days later I had a similar experience, spotting a pair of flowers one day, then nothing the next time I looked, not just the flowers gone but the leaves and stems as well. I suspected hungry deer. They use our trails every day, and likely they were the ones to bring trillium seeds to our land in the first place.
In May when I walk my dog at night, I look for my second ambassador of Spring, the wolf spider. Wolf spiders are easy to spot in the dark because they announce themselves with eerie, blinking lights, their multiple eyes reflecting the beam of a headlamp. Spiders yes, but they spin no webs and never dangle from a doorpost or limb. Instead, they are fierce hunters who spend their entire lives on the ground. If I stoop at night for a closer look, they freeze and the blinking stops. Female wolf spiders carry their young on their backs, first in a white sac, then after hatching as live passengers. What better emblem could there be for the arrival of Spring?
Long before people arrived, the earth circled the sun and seasons changed. Now that we are here and part of the cycle, our minds and hearts seek meaning when evidence suggests that Nature, with all her magic and beauty, is as indifferent to us as she is to all her plants and creatures. Our restless hearts turn us into romantics and philosophers, into beekeepers and Druids, and in Spring we find hope even in unstable times. And this May I, weary of a long life and maybe a little jaded, will believe once again, if just for an instant, that trillium blooms for me and that wolf spiders at night beam a personal message that says, “Here we are together again and good for another year.”