March 13th. The morning is cold, I have my work jeans on, stained from yesterday’s dirt and clay, and my giant hoodie on top, nearly freezing. But the morning and the hope warms me plenty. The time change ties me to the bed, even past sun-up, and I roll around calling for the dogs to come cuddle with me. Only one comes and she’s drooling and wetting my pillow.
Fine, I’m up. Slipping on socks and my slippers (not adequate farm shoes if you live in the mountains like me), stumbling out of the door, rubbing my eyes. Blue jays scream and fly above me, over the house and into the woods. Two I think. Then down the stone steps to my beloved chickens. Half my flock died from a horrible disease and the horrible winter. Now I have four more babies and they are the joy of the world to me. I let the hens out, then the pullets, and brace for whatever conflict there will be between the two. The dogs come down, searching fervently for poop to eat; they’re not picky with the type. I angrily rush them back up, but not before walking the perimeter of our soon-to-be garden, lined with blackberries and elderflower and raspberries and crape myrtle maybe, a forsythia as well, I think, somewhere amongst them. Yesterday I started planting a second row, to outline the opposite perimeter of the garden. “Planting a garden means having hope for the future”.
I sit on the couch now, in the sunroom, reading a book by a local Yankee-turned-first-gen-Appalachain-farmer. I met him once, unknowingly, and offered him a basket full of blueberries we had just picked, last summer in the town over from us. He happily took and ate many, and then even came back for more. I read his testimony of his life here, inspiring my own, and I hear a turkey. It sounds closer than it probably is, because you see when it’s chilly like this, I believe the air is thinner and sounds can travel much easier. On the chilliest of days, but not the bitter cold of the winter, the days that promise sun but for right now is still groggy with sleep, I can hear cows just beyond my forest line. It sounds like they’re just down there in the holler over from us. They’re probably across the river but sometimes I like to imagine they’re down in my pasture, waiting for me.
My love doesn’t hear the turkey, even though each time it gobbles, I look up from my book starry-eyed, with my eyebrows raised in quiet questioning. “Did you hear it that time???”, my face asks, no, I’m told. It sounds like she’s just outside the kitchen window. I go to look for my friend, who I named Honeysuckle last Fall, but I don’t see her. Last year she had a line of chicks following her around. I open the back room’s window just in case.
The Mourning Doves coo, a sound that feels like a memory. You know the one. Then the Blue Jays whistle. The call I couldn’t put into words even if I tried. A whistle and a song overlap, both from the Blue Jay I think. Then the scream. So much life! It has returned, just as I had prayed for every day of cold, desolate, miserable winter. Yesterday I held Daffodils in my hand. No really. Four of them. I place two on my love’s desk, in a small glass jar. Crocus of all colors pop up in my garden wall. Purple and white and purple with white stripes. Orange! Last year they all came up sporadically, across a few weeks, but this year they all pop up together, like they were together, pushing up from the dirt, hurriedly, impatiently, like they couldn’t wait. Me either! I welcome them with a shriek, unable to contain my excitement, much it seems, like them.
I run out to the deck to yell at the dogs for barking at our neighbor driving up. He slows to let the chickens cross the road. My fingers are pricked with the chill. March, now! I know it is over. The endless winter, the punishment of the cold and of Death. It is truly over now, and the world in front of me is Spring and then, if you could even believe it, Summer. God, Summer. Wineberries and creek swims and 9pm sunsets and wildflowers and warmth. Warmth, I’ve missed you. As my sunburn will prove, I’ll never take you for granted again. I’ll never complain of your blistering, sweltering cruelty. Instead I’ll rejoice in it. For warmth means no cold. The mornings are still cold but in a different way and anyway, I know the afternoon will bring the warmth. I trust her now. And for that I rejoice endlessly. I sing and dance and sit and stare and once more, find the joy and the hope. It was buried under the snow, it turns out. But always there. Just like the crocus, it was taking a nap underground. It just had to push its way through the dirt for me to stumble upon.
Maybe it was all for nothing, the loss and the misery and the sadness, but for now, for right now, it was for the Daffodils and the birdsong and the gobbler in the holler, as my beloved neighbor calls them and I will forever call them too, now. It was for the green return, the Spring Awakening. The watching of life coming back, anxious to get back to it. Back to the songs, back to the runs through the field, back to naughtily nibbling on all my new tree’s growth. I curse them, but who am I kidding, I couldn’t possibly. For now, it was all worth it.
My chicken scream, for whatever reason they always do, mayhaps to tell me she’s laid an egg, and I’m reminding to drink my coffee, cold now, and eat my oats so I can be fueled for my day of labor ahead of me. I’ll push off the thoughts of shortcomings, of failure, of disappointment placed onto me by those who claim to know me, of which I may talk about later, that burrow into my brain like a wood-boring beetle in soft decayed oak. But for now, my chickens scream and the Chickadee chirps and the Blue Jay whistles alongside them. The outside world, my family, beckons me, so I gotta hurry up and go. March, Now! And I can’t keep it waiting any longer.
(3/13/25)
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