Landscape Aspiring to Spring

Hard to believe spring is on its way, but yesterday marked the onset of the spring equinox. Two days earlier we forged through the after-effects of a sizeable snowstorm, plunging through the snow, feeling the wind whipping it against our faces throughout the course of our walk in the ravine, so cold that even the new snow crunched underfoot. A week earlier the creek down in the ravine was frozen solid, overladen with a thick blanket of snow.

Yesterday we barely edged above freezing on the thermometer and without the cleats over our boots we would have slithered all over the icy trail. Our faces knew that the spring that brings warmth and new life had not yet arrived. But overnight the temperature gradually rose and the skies opened to a robust downpour that continued all night. In the morning we were treated to a thunderstorm with claps that rocked the house.

Our little dogs ventured uncertainly out into the rain to relieve themselves post-sleep and as we opened the doors the trill of a cardinal carried into the house. Later we heard a red-winged blackbird, and saw a robin again sitting on a branch of one of our Sargentii crab trees, nibbling on a tiny crabapple. They have trust that spring has arrived and if their cheerful faith doesn't smooth over the edges of our misgivings, what will?

On our way up the street the air was alive with birdsong, that of a flock of purple finches flirting in the branches of a tall spruce. The sky was heavily overcast, but the rain had stopped for now. As we dipped into the ravine, the wind soughed, sifted, sighed through the trees. Treetops shifted their balance in one direction, then the other, under the wind's insistent influence.

Where a day earlier this wind slapped our faces with cold, everything now seems to have changed. It's now a balmy wind, caressing our faces, our heads now bare of winter covering. The snow in the ravine is still deep; it will take more than one heavy rain event to wash it away, but before we're halfway down into the ravine we begin to hear the creek heavy with rainwater and meltwater swishing downstream.

The water is dark and muddy, whirling determinedly past all obstacles in its way, taking with it light bits of detritus the wind has brought down from overhanging boughs. Overhead, crows swirl and display themselves on the wind, enjoying their free ride, cawing triumphantly. There's a far-off repetitive call of a woodpecker punctuating the interstices of the forest trees.

The pine and poplar trunks are dark and sodden with rain. The bleached leaves of immature beech and ironwood still flag their presence; at winter's onset signalling surrender to the inevitable, now at winter's departure indicating the truce it has signed with spring. There's a teasingly-brief flicker of sun before it's once again obscured by fast-moving clouds and we wonder whether we'll complete this walk before another rainfall.

Button moves jauntily along the trail before us, skipping from time to time as she is wont to do, indicative, we always think, of feelings of happiness in her favourite landscape. She wears a bright red sweater today against the black of her hair, flaunting her presence on this white-and-dark arras. Riley too wears only one coat, not the usual sweater-under-coat and he too is moving along with sprightly alacrity, happy to be out.

The snow beside the trunks of some trees has begun to shrunk and has been coloured with tannin leached from the trunk; last fall's leaves puddling around the trunk as they decay. Red osier dogwood leap into our vision in colour-contrast to the dark trunks, the white underlay.