Some friends and I took a late-February hike through snow-covered trails in our local woods. After a long sedentary winter, this was a welcomed and spirited outing.
Our senses came alive when we realized the first vibrations of spring had already begun. Deep within the forest canopy, a faint green mist hovered above and around us. Though we knew it was the reflecting light of the newly greening forest, to us it could have been the exhaled breaths of leaf buds and branch tips. Melting snow exposed spongy, moist soil, thickening the air with a pungent, earthy, somewhat moldy quality.
We tromped through wet and mushy paths of mixed leaves and snow. The leaves recognizable only by the remaining network of veins that had held the fleshy parts together before last Autumn’s leaf drop. These botanic skeletons, too, will turn completely to dust as the woods dry out over the next few months. Hikers will again see the bare soil of the trails. The leaf dust pushed aside, merely a part of the forest floor.
Each of us on that trail had our own personal markers, harbingers of spring. Our searches for them became ‘make or break’ decisions on whether the seasons were truly changing.
One friend felt it so, after discovering unfurling fronds of Cinnamon Ferns popping through the snow. Another, while watching newly-greened watercress getting washed in the icy, fast-moving stream of Winter's thaw. The third, after lifting a rock to uncover a slumbering, squiggly mass of newts that immediately scrambled for a new hiding place.
We were suburban naturalists seeking connections to an increasingly distant natural world, squishing along, reveling that our boots got sucked into the muck.
The sightings my friends and I anticipate each year and the sensory awakening we shared, can be found along any path, in any wood. My enduring amazement of spring’s energy is fueled with the knowledge that regardless of any previous devastating natural or human event, the Earth abides and celebrates life again each year.
As we headed back to our cars, people we passed on their way in seemed anxious to start their own pilgrimage. We smiled at them knowingly, wordlessly assuring them that many clues lie ahead.
They, in turn, looked at our mud-soaked pants and boots with a bit of envy.