Spring Comes

I move from winter to spring with the grace of a refrigerator.

The days grow warmer – and so do I - under the bulk of my old coat and boots, reluctant to make any change.

I’m used to getting bundled up – to peering gravely out the frosted window at the thermometers’ tiny stab of red – to grumbling to myself about the snow and ice – to filling the woodstove, to the sweet wretched smoke, to the dark afternoons.

Going to the wood pile, that was my exercise...

Where am I supposed to put my hat and mittens, where I am supposed to stow my grumbles?

Come the middle of February the birds who never left are staggered by the changing light and start to sing. Spring is coming, their voices say.

The snow gets ragged and the trampled yellow grass is treasured here and there with green shoots that soon burn cold with purple blossoms...

Of course, I’ve forgotten all the names of every bird and flower.

By late March, in my old coat and boots, I’m still working the woodpile, still banking on another frost.

It’s not just amnesia – my heels are dug in.

I don’t want to lose my logs or my smoke or my dark afternoons.

I don’t know where to put my cold things or find my warm things and I can’t remember what anything is called.

But then perhaps because the chic-a-dee says its own name within its song or perhaps because the redwing blackbird is black with red wings,I begin to remember.

In a single move, I lose my hat and let the fire die.
Hang my old wool coat on a nail in the closet...kick my boots below.

In cotton pants, small shoes and a butterfly shirt that catches the wind, I go and sit, feather light and hardly there, pulled by the sun to the rocks near the river.

Crocus, I whisper to the purple and white flower. I remember you now.

Hello daffodils, forsythia, tulips.

Hello grosbeak, sparrow, blue jay, robin.

The frogs at night, the peepers.

The songlines of summer.

Thin bears strolling past nighttime windows.

Fireflies, bats, ladybugs, lupines...and eventually apples.

The birds sing their songs, the earth sings its flowers.

And I have poked free of my coat and woodsmoke, and whisper out the names of the world, as Mr. Whitman once wrote - naming things by the river, nameless myself, I sing the body electric.

Sherwin Sleeves comes from the imagination of writer Sean Hurley, who lives in Thornton, New Hampshire.