Posted on Sat, Mar. 08, 2008

From out of the darkness of a silent, frozen season I thought I heard a hopeful stirring.

It may have been the first birdfoot violets, preparing to thrust up through leaf litter and announce the spring. Or a turkey hen, scratching in a thicket, scouting for just the place to make her next month’s nest.

More likely it was only a trick of imagination. Unless perhaps it was the gray fox vixen, come to lay early claim to that space under the cabin floor for bringing off another litter of her kits.

The truth is that I don’t need a calendar’s declaration of winter’s ending. It’s an event I can summon up at will from a time remembered.

The rhythmic tink-tink of snowmelt dripping from the eave …

A faint wash of yellow-green in the willow thicket along the creek …

A flock of northing geese, dark shadows across the face of a silver moon …

The whisper of a soft breeze at evening — one that does not come pushing yet another spell of frigid nastiness before it …

I know all these small signals of the turn toward a sweeter time, because many years ago — 48 to be exact — I passed a winter in that woodland cabin. And it was a winter a good deal more brutal than this one we’ve just endured.

The awful cold descended in late February. I’ve since read that low temperatures across the state in the month that followed ranged from 5 degrees below zero to 40 below, making it the coldest March in Missouri history.

Mercifully, I did not have that information at the time. All I knew was that the fire in my heating stove regularly burned out at 3 or 4 a.m., my wood pile was shrinking fast, and the thermometer hanging on my porch wall read a consistent minus-7 morning after morning.

For warmth in bed I had a 20-year-old Boy Scout sleeping bag, intended for nothing worse than autumn chill, and two beagles sleeping on my feet.

But we made it through, those dogs and I. And then overnight, as though by a miracle, the world was changed.

When I stepped outside at daybreak to fetch kindling to restart the fire, the air seemed almost balmy. In fact, the mercury had risen to not quite 20 degrees, but comfort is relative. It’s defined by the pain that’s gone before.

Crazy as it sounds, I actually slipped off my shoes and, in a kind of primitive celebration, shuffled barefoot in the crisp leaves a few moments before going back inside.

Under the sun of middle morning the last patches of old snow slid off the roof.

In afternoon, the beagles found a place below the pond spillway where the water ran free of ice, and after drinking they had a short swim.

At early evening, I heard the shrill call of the year’s first spring peeper from the oak woods just to the east.

And in full dark, the geese passed over again, singing their fine, wild melody of comradeship. Only this night, unlike before, the moon whose face they crossed was mellow golden, not white and cold as polished bone.

That’s how the sudden spring came that year when I was not yet 30. And how, very soon, it will come for us again.