One afternoon, if you are very still, you might hear a sound like a rusty pump handle. That is the first wood frog, thawing out from its frozen sleep. It has spent the winter with ice in its veins, its heart stopped, no different from a pebble. Now it is singing for a mate. If that is not a miracle, then the word has no meaning. But let us not romanticize too much. April is also the month of irritation. It is the car that needs washing three times in one week. It is the driveway that turns to soup. It is the day you wear shorts because the morning was warm, only to shiver through a raw, windy afternoon. April has no manners. It will give you a perfect, cloudless 68-degree day, and then follow it with a raw, gray, 42-degree drizzle that seeps into your bones.
And then鈥攖he green. Oh, the green. It arrives overnight, it seems. One morning you look across the valley and the trees are still gray twigs. The next morning, they are wrapped in a haze the color of pistachio. This is the famous "spring green," a shade that painters have tried and failed to capture for centuries. It is not a color so much as an event. It is the sound of chlorophyll rushing through a trillion tiny veins. It is the planet holding its breath and then letting it out all at once. The bird feeders, neglected all winter, suddenly become battlefields. The goldfinches are losing their olive drab for buttercup yellow. The juncos, those snowbirds, are packing their bags for the north, and in their place come the newcomers: the phoebe, pumping its tail on a fence post; the kinglet with its jewel-like crown; and finally, the herald of everything good, the song sparrow, singing from the highest branch of the lilac bush. month in spring
So here is to the middle child of spring. Here is to the month that cannot make up its mind. Here is to the puddles and the crocuses, the wood frogs and the phoebes, the green haze on the hillsides and the last, stubborn patches of snow in the north-facing ditches. One afternoon, if you are very still, you
You notice it in the evening. Suddenly, dinner is not eaten in darkness. Suddenly, there is time for an after-supper walk. The world stays open longer. Porch lights come on later. There is a sense, in the last week of April, that winter is finally, truly, behind us. The dogwoods explode in white and pink. The redbuds set the roadsides on fire. The air smells of cut grass and damp earth and something else鈥攕omething that might be hope. We do not just survive April. We earn May. The lilacs will come, and the irises, and the peonies heavy with ants and scent. The tomatoes will go in the ground, and the corn will rise, and the light will turn syrupy and golden. But none of that happens without April. None of that happens without the rain and the mud and the false starts. None of that happens without the willingness to plant seeds in cold soil and trust that the world knows what it is doing. Now it is singing for a mate