Spring!

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First hepatica at the Cobble - like little ragamuffin children bursting out of their dark, winter-weary houses into the sunlight, clad only in raggedy leaf dresses with flowers in their hair.

There's an open space preserve nearby named Bartholomew's Cobble where I often go to hike, especially now when warmer weather brings snow melt and the forest floor wakes up. Spring is the season of littles - all those baby plants! One of my favorite first flowers is the blunt lobed hepatica (see above).

Hepatica at the Cobble

The merest hint

of spring brings them out

like small children bursting

from a winter-weary house.

Out of the dark into the light

wearing only leaf scraps

for clothing and flower petals 

round their heads,

they clamber over rocks

and peer down the wooded hillsides

to the wandering river—

or lean back to stare, yellow-eyed

at the blue bowl of sky.

How such a small, green, growing thing

can move the weighted earth,

how blooms so delicate, so barely visible,

can reach and swell the human heart,

is one of the world's
happiest miracles.

If I stand still on the Cobble path and close my eyes, what comes first are not images, but sounds - the plaintive two note song of the chickadee and the harsher call of the phoebe, the whisper of disturbed leaves, the crackle of twigs underfoot, the sigh of the wind through the hemlock and cedars, the scritching of windblown oak leaves, the startled honk of a goose and a great flapping of feathers. 

The sun hugs my shoulders, the breeze pats my cheek. Eyes open now, I see a splash of brilliant green moss, the small spirals and whorls of fuzzy stems, leaves lifting to the sun. Such small things growing under the giant trees. The wind whirls like a child at play, then hunkers down to blow at a leaf. 

I stop to break the fragile ice that has shrunk to the size of a dinner plate in the middle of a puddle. The sweet, fertile scent of mud, of the earth waked from its winter sleep, fills me with elation.

I could look for spring in the curled 

leaf bud of the lilac bush

in the happy morning sunlight or

the kissing warmth of the southern wind

Maybe it's in the cardinal's love song'

or in the mad swirl of starlings

streaming from the treetops

or even the delighted burble of

a road side stream

I could poke under last year's leaf mulch

for this year's bloodroot

or kick the gritty snowbank into

a thousand glistening fragments

but I think I will simply go to the edge of

the road where the mud lives and

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breathe deep