We are entering that season which is neither winter nor spring – the season I call ‘Not Spring’. Temperatures have moderated, hovering in the upper 50s and even reaching 60 degrees on one or two occasions. There hasn’t been any snow or frost for the last couple of weeks, and the March rains have begun in earnest. Wave after wave of storms are arriving on Humptulips County’s shores from the direction of Hawaii, drenching the land and soaking it into instability on hillsides lacking vegetation.
This is the sort of weather that promises life while seeming dreary. Seen from inside a warm, dry house, a dull, overcast, rainy day makes us seek the homely comforts, the kind of comfort to be found in a good book, a bowl of soup, a cup of tea or hot chocolate, or a warm fire – the kinds of comfort we spend the rest of the year working to achieve; the kind of rest we seek after enduring another frenetic rotation of the seasons.
But there is much more to these Not Spring days than can be seen through cloistered, indoor eyes – especially when the wind dies down and the rain falls straight down onto the earth. Rain fell steadily yesterday, but if the loudly promised winds blew at all, they failed to reach the Farm. Yesterday’s rain fell in straight, determined lines, but not in a torrent. I suddenly found myself restless in the midst of my comforts, as if the rain was calling me, compelling me to come outside. So I went out onto our front porch to find out why. There I found the first truly spring rain of the season.
Spring rains have an ambience all their own. They possess a soothing, pattering, tinkling noise peculiar to the season. Instead of falling with the necessary force required to denude trees as fall rains must, spring rains are gently persistent. They seek to spare the plants from damage, to rouse and awaken each green fuse (as Dylan Thomas would say), to urge the resident life-force to circulation and resurrection.
Our front porch is covered. It was designed by my brother, Frank, to tie our house to the landscape from which it rises. It overlooks our turnaround and our fields to the front and to the right, and butts up against flowerbeds and a pine grove on the left. It is lined with cedar planking to add decoration to its shelter. It is a favored location to partake of the outdoors, for it brings shade in the summer, protection from all forms of precipitation, and the comforts of a porch swing and outdoor furniture in all seasons.
As I stood on our porch and listened, I became mesmerized. First by the music of the rain: the soft swoosh of its descent onto grass, its tinkling feeding of the puddles freckling our black top, the plink of each drip of overflow from the edge of the rain gutter; then by a full-throated chorus of birds celebrating the rain’s fall, celebrating its promise of spring, a chorus composed of the songs of nuthatches, stellar jays, chickadees, starlings, robins, juncos, woodpeckers, and all of the other kinds of birds I am too unsophisticated to name. The rain served as woodwind, bass, and percussion, the birds as flute and clarinet gracing the rain’s steady rhythmic line.
And as I watched, a lone chickadee came to light on the topmost branch of the dogwood tree immediately adjacent to the place where I was standing. It sat in the rain and preened, then hopped to another branch and then another, always taking a moment to preen again on each new branch, always watching me with one cautious eye. It seemed to be aware of my state of ardor, respectful of my enjoyment of the music, for it added its slight song occasionally to the chorus between preenings. But it was not fooling me. For ten feet to my right, in front of our kitchen window, hangs the chickadees’ favorite feeder, a gift from our friends Tom and Carrie. I gradually became aware that the chickadee had come to remind me of its interest in the feeder, waiting as patiently as it could for me to return to the house, to my natural habitat, so that he might get on with the business of life.
The chickadee’s song was quiet, almost lost within the mix of rain and chorus, but distinctive due to its proximity: brave in its soft utterance; alive, hopeful, and reassuring in its persistence. Eventually another chickadee answered from the pines across the turnaround, and my watcher bobbed as if to say goodbye and flew off to a pine across the way. From there he resumed his watch.
When his message finally came through to me, when the penny dropped, I returned inside. For I realized my friend had been trying to remind me that this time is Not Spring and, despite its incipient promise, the seeds, buds, and grasses that sustain the chickadees and other birds are not yet in evidence. Back inside, I went to stand by the kitchen window to drink a glass of water – all that falling water having made me thirsty. And as I looked out, there on the feeder was a chickadee stabbing at seed and watching me through the window, as if he knew it was all right to be distracted by his feeding given the safety of the barrier between us.
I want to think the chickadee feeding there was my friend from the dogwood, for friend he was as he sat calmly watching me, safe in the knowledge that he could fly far faster than I can run and higher than I can jump. I want to think that my friend respected my wish to enjoy an early spring symphony and patiently waited for me to take my full enjoyment of it so that he, in turn, might visit the feeder. I want to think he and I enjoyed a form of cross-species communication and cooperation; that he, having first let me drink my fill of song, having first said grace, having first sung for his supper, was now entitled to have me watch him eat his fill of seed.
