It’s the end of February and the mountains of PA have seen one of the most generously snowy winters that we have experienced in years. It reminds me of my years on the wild and beautiful Keweenaw Peninsula in Northern Michigan.
But now, as in the North, there’s a good bit of time in anticipation of Spring that is very different than Winter. Temperatures occasionally nosing well into the 50s contrast with the tired, hardening snow pack. Surface breezes that try to make sense of the warm air and the cold snow are heavy with a distinctive clean humidity pulled from the thawing ice.
One of my favorite memories was decades ago in Michigan is standing alone atop a hill this time of year. I was experiencing a host of challenges with family and puberty. I gazed out over the thawing snow that rested upon the rolling glacial eskers while that distinctive early Spring breeze seemed to calm and clear away all my angst and familial inflammation, if only for a while, rather like the way an ice pack slowly warms on a bruise.
This time of year is different from Winter. Astronomically, of course, it’s Winter. But gone is the bleakness and chill of midwinter, gone is the anticipation of a long season of hardship and austerity. Yet there is no green, birds have not yet broken into their breeding chorus. The ground is covered with cold, ugly, and dirty ice. The stirrings of the air, however, are undeniable. The pioneering trickles that part the snow in convoluted pathways down the branching rills on the mountainside grow to become rivulets, and then streams. Although unseen, the tubers, corms, and bulbs of all the distinctively blooming spring plants are thawing, and taking up water in anticipation of relief from the snow pack. Sap begins to surge in the trees.
I propose this sub-season be called the Antevern, or the “Before Spring,” and it’s one of my favorite times of the year.