Fingers Crossed

We don’t often get days in mid-March when the earth stokes us with warm heat, but that’s what we got Sunday, and today too.  Yesterday, it was warm enough to sit outside without a jacket, without a fleece even, to gaze at the garden still littered with the remnants of last year’s leaves.  This morning, my daughter, an hour-and-a-half north, texted to let me know she was wearing flip-flops.  In March?  Unheard of.

Already there is evidence of spring—the wrinkled foxglove leaves where they’ve seeded themselves— green rags flopping between crevices in the rocks at the back of the garden.  

 

 In the side yard, blooming snowdrops mound in the grass.  Out front, purple crocuses help to hide the cement foundation under the brick porch.

We cracked the window before we went to bed last night, and woke in pre-dawn light to the soft swish of cars driving down the highway a half-mile away, and the wirt-wirt, peeb-beat of birds—sounds that come to us fresh and new each April, but this year have arrived weeks earlier.

In New England, the only thing we know to trust is the unexpected.  No matter how good things are, someone will caution us to anticipate the worst.  A snow storm in April doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.  Rarely, but in my lifetime, we’ve had snow in mid-May.  Earlier this year, I cautioned myself not to celebrate this string of warm weather too much, sure if I did, I’d jinx things.  

But as I parked the car in front of the town common today, and gazed at a woman dressed in a short sleeve shirt, sitting in front of the reflections mirrored in Meetinghouse Pond, I decided, on a day like this, it’s just too darn hard not to.