Spring: Verlyn Klinkenborg's Latest......

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/opinion/04mon4.html?_r=1&ref=opinion


April 3, 2011

Gains and Losses

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

After a long, scentless winter, apart from the tang of woodsmoke in the air, you could suddenly smell the earth again early one morning last week. It seems odd to call the scent fresh — it was darker and mustier than that — but fresh is how it felt, hovering like a ground fog above the last banks of snow. A whole field of clover could grow in that smell alone.

When the snow slid back at last, the grass looked as if it were waking from a long, sodden nap, and all but the stoutest plants, even the yuccas, had been bulldozed. Vole trails are still visible on what looks like a lawn of crushed velvet, and the ground isn’t quite soft underfoot yet, except where the gophers have been digging, and there it is spongy and accepting. The only ice left is under the scattered hay where the horses fed in the middle pasture. Every time I walk across it I think of 19th-century icehouses packed with the winter’s pond ice and insulated with sawdust and straw.

This was a winter with casualties. The snow undid the bottom row of insulators on the electric fence, one by one. I’ve lost track of the mice that wandered into my traps. Two losses above all leave me disheartened. One is the beehive. There was nothing stirring there on a 60-degree day a couple of weeks ago, no bees on the aconites or snowdrops. There will be a mournful spring harvest of honey as I clean out the hive and prepare it for a new colony next spring

What worries me most is the barn cat, whom I haven’t seen since the harshest days of early February. He had been coming up to the house to eat on the deck, but I usually saw him up in the hayloft, watching warily as I tossed down bales, or basking in a wedge of sunlight in the run-in shed. In the heaviest snow, he waited on a low dogwood branch until he saw me coming, and then hid until I set out his food. I believe he’s gone. But there’s just a chance that one warm day I’ll see him sitting — black and tailless — on a fence rail, looking at me as if to ask where I’ve been.