Winter's Slow Fade

The first robin of spring arrived in our yard this week. We noticed it Monday afternoon as we sat at the window watching snow sift steadily from the sky. The robin’s characteristic rusty red breast stood out in stark contrast to the whiteness enveloping the bird’s perch in our highbush cranberry, near the perennial garden. It will be a while, still, until that garden completely melts out, transforming from pristine white to sloppy, boot-sucking mud and small greening stems, and finally to a vibrant tangle of summer blooms.

Winter’s in a slow fade this year. It’s been a little bit one step forward, two steps back in the dance from one season to the next. But the considerable accumulation of our very cold and snowy winter is melting away, albeit gradually. It seems we’re about to turn the corner, really and truly, to spring.

The fields around our house, which are mostly south-facing, have melted down to a thick crust, covered with the occasional dusting of new spring snow. The driveway is now more mud than ice. Each day it seems something new emerges from the snow. Stone walls forgotten beneath a thick layer of white reappear along field edges. Tree stumps in the yard and boulders in the field we haven’t seen in months rise from the receding snow, causing many second glances in the dim light and foggy awareness of early morning – is that a bear or a big rock, a turkey or an old stump?

The snow fort at one end of the driveway, where the plow created colossal walls through winter, where snow benches and snow caves and curving sled runs were built, is diminished now to a mere hardened snowbank with an icy tunnel through the middle. Sandbox toys overlooked in our fall cleanup reappear, surfacing where they were dropped a season ago.

Other, not so pleasant, things emerge from the snow, too. A winter’s worth of dog droppings along the border of the yard. Tree limbs of various sizes, blown down during wind storms, which we’ll drag someday to the ever-growing brush pile out back. Roadside trash, which will fill many bags in the coming weeks.

We live along a road that cuts through to the local recycling center – a.k.a. The Dump – and items often blow from the beds of dump-bound pickup trucks to settle into the ditches and vegetation along our road. Each spring, as the snow recedes, we begin to pack plastic bags into pockets as we head out for walks and bike rides. Usually we fill these bags before we make it halfway to where we’re going, collecting beer bottles and soda cans, plastic lighters and crushed paper cups, a winter’s worth of debris scattered through the neighborhood.

As winter’s slow fade continues, as the litter and debris of both humans and nature is cleared away, new things – welcome things – emerge in their wake. Fiddleheads will soon unfurl along the roadsides. Slate-colored juncos and song sparrows have joined the ever-present chickadees at the spot where, until recently, the bird feeder hung. As those birds look for seeds dropped into the melting snow, the robins wait for worms to wiggle from thawing ground.

Just outside the picture window, where we noticed spring’s first robin, the snow has melted completely away from the house. There are daffodil and crocus bulbs planted there, and we watch to see if they have survived a winter of hungry rodents, if they will emerge from winter’s slow fade as another harbinger of spring, adding color to the changing landscape as the robin’s red breast did this week.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the April 10, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Turning the soil

For days now, I’ve been scanning the ground when I’m outside, watching the slowly growing shoots of green for signs of that first spring bloom. This is a ritual I’ve kept since childhood, when I would jump off the school bus each spring afternoon and scamper down the driveway to my mother’s flower garden, peering into the neat tangle of perennials just starting to brighten from winter brown to green. There was a small cluster of crocuses planted there, in Easter shades of purple and yellow and white. When the first one finally burst through and opened its dainty cup to the strengthening sun, I knew spring had arrived.

Some people, with drier, warmer garden beds than mine, have already spotted their first blooms this spring. Alas, while the snow has melted from our perennial garden, I think the one crocus we had has drowned. It seems I’ll be waiting awhile still for the first sunny burst of yellow daffodils, which will fade away to deep purple flag irises, feathery pink astilbe, and buttery gold Stella D’Oro daylilies.

While I wait for the flowers, I have turned my attention to the vegetable gardens, tending to the compost heap, which was neglected all winter, and tilling last fall’s layer of leaves into the dark, wet dirt. The big garden out back of the house is still too soggy to work much. But the two smaller beds in the side yard are well-drained and ready for planting. Into one of these this week we sowed our first crop of peas, dropping the small, dried spheres into the warming soil.

My children happily paused from their sandbox play to help set the wire fencing that will serve as pea trellis, then place a handful of seeds into neat rows. We all love the feeling of digging fingers into yielding earth, and we can nearly taste the sweet peas that will grow on the vines that sprout from those seeds, climbing slowly upward, then swelling with pods that we’ll break open for the sun-warmed treasure inside.

We’ve planted cherry tomato plants and cucumbers into pots inside, leaving them in the sunny shelter of the big window to soak in the warmth. The children check on these pots each day to see how the seedlings within have progressed. But this is not the same as digging in garden dirt, tilling the soil by hand, etching straight rows to take the seeds, carefully patting the earth above them.

So we have planted the first seeds of hope for a garden this year. And as the snow has receded, we have rediscovered some of our warmer weather activities – bike rides down the lane and walks through the woods road to the brook, where the children toss sticks for the dogs to chase. In our early spring ramblings, we have encountered all sorts of lichen and fungi, puff balls that smoke spores when touched, squirrel middens under tall hemlock trees, and a place on the big boulder out back where some animal scraped away thick moss in search, we think, of a meal.

Still, we are waiting for that first bloom. It might come with the daffodils, which creep higher each sunny day. But sometimes we find the first spring flowers in the wild – bloodroot peeking from beneath the crooked old apple tree by the clothesline, or marsh marigolds growing in bright patches along the brook, or trilliums and trout lilies pushing through leaf litter along the roadside. While we wait, we’ll keep turning the soil, preparing for the long, hot, growing days of summer.

And in the fall, after the vegetables have been harvested and the perennials cut back for winter, after I’ve turned the soil for the last time this year, I’ll try to remember to plant some crocus bulbs in the patch of garden by the living room’s big window, where the sun hits early and stays all day. That way, next year, we won’t have to look so hard or wait so long for the first bloom of spring.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears in the April 25, 2014 edition of the Record-Littleton.