Those early winters

The peace lily in my bathroom has sent up a tightly rolled bud, as it does every March and September: the two times of year when the hours of available daylight suggest “spring.” It will be a long time before any flowers bloom outside–our snowdrops are still buried in a head-high pile of snow, and I’ve abandoned all hope for crocuses–but it’s heartening that even a potted plant can sense the eventual arrival of spring.

I’ve been around the sun enough times to know how New Englanders cherish even the smallest signs of spring. Our backyard cardinals have been singing in the gradually brightening mornings, it’s still light after 5:00 pm, and we can once again see the top of our backyard birdbath above the shrinking and settling snowpack. Last night we got a couple inches of new snow, but it was sloppy mix of ice and rain: the sludgy stuff that falls in autumn and spring, when temperatures are volatile.

Sometimes during these tenuous in-between days, I wonder how prehistoric humans handled those early winters before the sequence of seasons was a known, predictable thing. Before calendars tracked the pattern of the seasons, did those early humans give up all hope of winter ever ending? Even a potted plant somehow counts the hours of available sunlight, and even backyard birds know when to sing in spring. We humans, though, rely upon our big, ponderous brains, which equivocate on this and other important matters.

In March, we humans waver in our hopes, uncertain whether spring will ever come. We doubt and we question, our fluctuating moods as indecisive as weather. But both the plants and birds know the light is lengthening and the season shifting, snow gradually giving way to sun as the earth leans into another turn. While we humans waver and wonder, the birds and plants simply know.

Apart from the peace lily at the top of this post, today’s photos come from a January trip to the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, when the snow was as dense and sludgy as today’s.