March
Restless Days
Dormant vegetation is supposed to start awakening when the average mean temperature rises to 43 degrees, normally occurring in the northeast between April 1 and 15. Under unusually mild conditions, with the average minimum temperature lingering for some length of time above 32 degrees, growth begins sooner. This is of course a generality, a law of likelihood, which may be applied to an indefinite number of conditions. Spring may be spring, and winter winter, but March is a part of both February and April. During the warm days in February, the buds of the Mayflower or trailing arbutus begin to swell, while the skunk cabbage is steadily pushing up through frozen, marshy ground. Life does not recur after death so much as show its readiness; but in March the first obvious bursts of change begin to show, like those mountainous clouds coming up out of the west, with a fresh warm wind.
The huge clouds roll loose and fan upwards in the gold afternoon. Then the wind changes. A blowing, whispering snow comes out of the southeast, cruel to promise, blotting out the swelling buds, the feeling of release in the air, as if to say promise is nothing without what is not promised. Nothing is realized without the possibility of disaster.
“Ahh!” the indrawn breath of a storm, a swirling and seething to make life hide. The snow hisses incessantly into every corner and crevice. High-rolling, roaring tides push in. The storm rises to a mountainous capacity. The sea is fulsomely moaning, running under a white darkness. Comber after comber curls over, spills and plunges down, pounding the sands.
The wind seems to pause. It races violently as if to have another try at climactical energy. Then hail clicks down, spattering tree trunks and ground. The snow is turning to cold rain. We are getting “dirty weather.” I feel a load of anger and disgust in me that rivals the storm.
I am, to some degree, a subject of these changing days. I come out of a kind of hibernation of my own that might not be connected with the actual state of the weather, but it has its parallels. It is so with my own temper. I hold it for fear of being overwild, and then some outer wildness, a change of air, an adjustment to open sunlight, brings me to a free delight, a sense of opportunity that I thought was gone.
March may seem cold, raw, and gloomy for most of its duration, but it begins consistently to offer evidence of new things. A white moth flies up in the headlights of my car one night. A robin jumps down to the wet, matted grass of the lawn. I seem to catch a new note of triumph in a crow. The chickadees are playing, chasing, constantly flitting from tree to tree. They call and answer one another like so many bells. They have a call that is sometimes mistaken for a phoebe’s, but with three notes: “Fee-a-bee.” And their song has a single phrase: “Here pretty” with an occasional syncopated pause followed by: “Pretty, pretty.” Sometimes two of them sing at the same time, one on an upper and the other on a lower key.
A male blue bird, rare these days, perches on a wire, singing in sweet querulous tones, and I hear the continuous, talkative trill of a purple finch, a lovely casual song that comes from its throat like fast-dripping water.
Snow falls, or sleet, and the songs stop. The weather clears and the birds begin again, like chronometers of an underlying spring music. The sunlight glitters and I hear them again, just as I notice that the waters in the distance have changed from the hard blue of the winter and are streaked with green, as if filled with new veins of life. Color and music spring and change along with new numbers and demands, part of nature’s structure of love, a slowly increasing force, spreading out like a fan.
There is a reddening in knotty oak twigs. I notice the leaves on a dwarf clover plant, tentatively but surely uncurling. Small eels are dashing back and forth in an aquarium with a new excitement, nipping at their fellow inmates, a sunfish and a minnow.
This is the time of year that many animals start moving out of winter quarters, changing their range. On the highway I see dead muskrats that have been hit by cars, as well as some male gray squirrels. The squirrels sometimes dash back and forth across the road in a frantic kind of dance.
Frost still lies deep in the ground. As they have done throughout the winter, quail pipe high, across the swishing, roaring wind. But there is a new restlessness abroad. The air itself seems to change now and then to an easier, looser abandon. Cold days, arrestations, come, but in counterbalance to surges of allowance and release. Life is beginning to seek its opportunities.
I am impatient for spring, as raw, unseasonably cold weather continues, and then I see a dark little caterpillar on the road, or a mourning cloak butterfly, sprung out of hibernation. I hear a pair of mourning doves, cooing with slow measure and deliberation, long silences between. They seem to say something to me about attention. “What will come may not be, as yet. But we know when. And you might if you listened.”
If I listened, and if I watched, found each insect as it came out of hibernation, comprehended a tree as a living thing, beginning to stir and seek, followed the development of buds and roots, the unseen life that stirs in egg or chrysalis through every inch of ground.
There is, in common with the rest of the year’s revolutions, nothing neat or simple about the process of reawakening. It has started already. Raccoons in this area begin to breed in February and start foraging for their young in March. The great horned owl nests in January and February. During the dead of winter a few animals such as skates and barnacles start breeding in offshore waters. Variable reaction in this time of change is as complex as the order which controls it.
Hibernation itself, that mysterious state which is somewhere between death and sleep, differs in various species. Some mammals hibernate not because of outside conditions but because of internal changes in their blood stream, as if timed not to the weather but the year. Each life is cyclical, corresponding accurately to the circling of the globe, but in mode and terms it differs vastly. When the frogs begin to stir around a local pond, birds, independent of hibernation, move back from other climates. Late in March a few alewives swim into fresh water from the sea. Late in April large numbers begin to show up, at a time which only varies by a few days, year after year. Yet their arrival, like their growth and responses, is conditioned by any number of circumstances that are not only physically distant from us but may be remote as yet from scientific scrutiny. To realize that the slightest changes in temperature can affect whole worlds of life, and that this factor is only one of many, can make a man feel hopelessly inept.
So spring is not to come now, nor tomorrow, suddenly complete with shy warmth and flowers according to our expectations, but will take its periodic time, within a wide range and with enormous resources. By the same token, no spring comes pleasantly, without a certain amount of doom in its wake. A flock of male blue birds flies north too soon. They die during a severe snow storm or a week of extreme cold. Thawing takes place too suddenly for one form of life, and too quick a drop in temperature will kill another.
March is complex and March is in a rage, though I begin to feel a universal response, a gradual turn, in the ground, through the trees, down by the shore as the wind changes from tearing things loose to a peaceful low breathing. I smell salt things on the edge of motion, balanced on a tip of allowance. I hear what I am unable to see, stirring, tuning up across the land. The response may be hesitant or bold, delayed or premature, but it is coming. There is knowledge around me, even purpose, whether or not it is working in mindless ways. When I see sunlight playing on a blade of grass, I see the component parts of wisdom. Then the grass joins the squirrel in its dance. Eels join men in restlessness and speculation.