All at once, you notice that the light is different. It draws your gaze; it makes you look up and around for the first time in a long while. For (how long?) it's just been a sliver of harsh glare squeezing out from under a distant door. Both too much and not enough. But now, the light--it's there before waking, and still there as commuters make their way home. Finally, you can feel it: winter is on the wane.
But these fellows say it so much better:
What might be called the ideal February, the best that can be hoped for, occurs when the arctic air mass that deep-freezes our state extends far to the south of us. Though the consequence of that can be some of the bitterest weather we can endure, it also brings a series of crystalline skies and unblemished days through which the sun shines with determined persistence. The thermometer may still read below freezing day after day, and three or four feet of snow may still lie on the ground (and should, for the protection it provides is as needed now as ever); but light streams into the house, illuminating corners of rooms that have not been bright since October.
Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, A Year at North Hill
Most days these days, I quiet my racing mind just before bedtime by dipping into A Year at North Hill. I doubt anyone needs to be reminded that this is, or why this is, a wonderful book--but I'm especially fond of this: its monthly chapters do not start with January and end with December, as do so many garden books (even my beloved Henry Mitchells). The book begins with April and ends with March...the most hopeful month.
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March It's the end of all strain It's the joy in your heart
"Waters of March", by Antonio Carlos Jobim, English lyrics by Susannah McCorkle (highly recommended: Art Garfunkel's version from Breakaway).
A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden. Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996. ISBN 0-8050-461403 (paperback).
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