Spring is coming though most people won’t acknowledge it by either the calendar or their cold.  But it is seeping up through the garden and riding the sounds in the air.  This morning is a dirty gray fog suspended in a dome overhead, dropping to the ground behind the fence and the trees.  Out front it swallows the end of the road that runs away from the door toward the river.  On days like this it is easy to sense the water down there pulling past us, in the heavy, deep pulse of its need to move.  In the eddies along the shore there will be fowl sheltering, muttering as a group when they are disturbed by something too close.  I cannot see them from my chair here, or my house at all.  But I believe they do not disappear when I am not looking and, on other days, I have looked for them and while walking watched their movements.  Today they would likely be shadowed in this mist as are all the far things: trees, houses, cars.  Every light still lit, a halo of glow hovering with unseen support.  Feeding the birds in the dark of earliest morning I found it to be that cold that I feel far more than the sub-zero temperatures that slice me open in a quick freeze and are done.  This dampness moves into me, a slow fluid-taking possession not easily shaken, like the ache of deep grief.

But spring is coming.  The cardinals are agitated with each other, their winter gentleness having turned overnight to quick spars and bursts of movement forward or away in a flash of feathers.  The shortened language they use in the dark season is lengthening.  I heard the start of the cardinal’s spring song last week, so out of place and unexpected it took me a moment to recognize it as theirs.  This morning, the second half was heard.  It won’t be long before the two will be joined in the one continuous melody of their mating season.  The hellebores are showing deep purple buds growing in the splay of last season’s browned leaves.  When I walk past the sight of them tugs at me to get the scissors and clean them up.  I think all their effort at this dullest time of year deserves that little bit on my part.  Though perhaps they find benefit of the extra layer when winter presses in again.  Two of the witch hazels are showing color, bright red or orange-yellow, along the branches; the sight of them is distracted by the few leaves that hang on.  If the sun were to warm them the color would unfurl in small tendrils, tissue paper clusters easily seen across the garden.  The daffodils, of course, are pushing up, visible here and there through the straw mulch laying in the woodland bed, or the ground covers elsewhere.  It is time to be careful walking through the straw noticing mounds not there before.  For underneath is surely a bunch of leafy straps, still bent over and white without the light’s greening them.  It is too early yet to intervene, freeing those that struggle to pierce through the thatch.  Again, as in previous years, I marvel at the tiny fountains of white striped dark green poking up in the gravel of the hot bed along the house and the path to the small pond.  How much time have I spent digging out every bulb I could find, at first with care and transplant, later exasperation and composting?  Yet here they appear once again.  I think it is time to accept that this is where they want to be and let them populate the spaces between the rosemary and lavender.  I will still pull the ones in the path.  But maybe not ‘til after their flowers are enjoyed.  A selfishness on my part.  Or, maybe just a breath of tolerance.  The same will be true of the columbine that will come later.  Yes, spring is coming.  I can bear this grayness a bit longer.