Naturalist March

I have never been in a war zone. At least, not when anything was
happening. I crossed the border from Ireland into Northern Ireland once
in the 1970s looking down the barrels of tripod machine guns set up on
sandbags, with the eyes of British soldiers peering suspiciously at me
behind them. I've been in European airports where khaki-clad troops
fingered the trigger guards of automatic weapons slung from their
shoulders. I once walked along a street in Seoul, South Korea, beside an
extremely unruly crowd of demonstrators who were about to be
dispersed by riot police, helmets on, clubs up, and plastic shields raised.
I can almost remember walking across the tarmac of an Eastern
European airport under small arms fire. Well, not quite, though the
guards at Bulgaria's international airport in Sofia have possibly the
meanest demeanors on Earth.
Thankfully, I've never had to go into battle. I have, however,
undergone the month of March many times here in Maine.
Spring in the Northeast is different from other parts of the world. In
Europe and China, spring is a great awakening - new-angled sunlight
spills through the morning window, the air gains a limpid warmth,
daffodils jump cheerfully from fresh garden plots, and everything is
stretching its limbs and unfolding toward life and summer after the
long, sleepy daze of winter.
Here, spring is more like coming to after being knocked unconscious in
combat. The snow is slowly receding, and everything that was frozen
comes into focus in a state of silent ruin. The yard appears to have been
shelled by artillery. Scraps and shards of shingles litter the porch and
walk. Gutters are broken. Sticks and branches blasted off trees by wind
and sleet are everywhere. The snow is turning black as it shrinks, with
the accumulated residue of dirt and debris and rotting bird seed shells.
Ice continents line the driveway by night and slowly crumble by day
into mud, which halted Napoleon. The lawn is ruin incarnate. Mucky
ruts from the snowplow's night raids. Abandoned baseball bats, the
wrecks of children's toy trucks, the stiff half-frozen carcasses of
once-living creatures appear. Ghastly smokes rise out of the snow while
it withers on the cow fields and soon splotches them in dirty white rags.
The trees with dead brown leaves under them stay skeletal for a long
time even though the days are warmer, the way fear and anxiety linger
in your grogginess even though you've woken up from a nightmare. The
bladelike shoots of garden flowers seem pugnacious and defiant, not
celebratory.
They are a greatly appreciated sight, however. They grip down and
surge upward with stark dignity, and begin the awakening. March, not
April, is the cruelest month here. Winter never really surrenders in these
parts until May, but the ground troops endure it and make the change to
summer.
Like we do. Winter will shell us again in April with some kind of frozen
ordnance, maybe a couple of rounds, but sluggish, dazed spring will
arrive on the heels of the first flowers. You can feel it coming, like
waking up and finding out, to your relief, that it was not a battle after
all, but just another long, strange trip in which no actual fighting ever
broke out.
Survived it again.