“Spring is like a perhaps hand in the window,” e e cummings wrote, and while I can never literally explain what he meant—what line of poetry can be literally explained?—the line always comes to mind when I see the first hints that spring will eventually be here, even in the mountains of northern New Mexico: a bud encrusted with snow, a nest that will soon be used, the first leaves of the daffodil bulbs I planted last fall.
“Hope is a thing with feathers,” another favorite line of mine—who knows the author?—stands for this time of year; snow showers, gales, melting snow, ice, and the Sangre de Cristo mountains still deep in fifty inches, and crowned, so often, with the thick clouds of another storm.
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