It hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it will have by the time you are reading this.
Maybe, by the time we reach the first Sunday of Lent, the first tips of my crocuses will have emerged from the flowerbeds near the back door and near the garage.
That, for me, is one of the first signs of spring, the first signs of the greening that will spread from early bulbs to grass to flowers to bushes and trees. The first sprouts often appear early in Lent, at a time that is really still the end of winter, both meteorologically and astronomically.
Since we almost always get snow in March and even April, those first messengers of the changing season must generally persevere and survive both nightly frosts and a few frigid days at a time.
But as the season changes, those cold spells are usually shorter, none of the weekslong periods where we don’t top 32 degrees we had this year in January and February. And even when the air is cold, if the sun comes out, it feels warm on my face.
This starts a period that will lead to the heat of summer. I don’t know what path it will follow: Will it be a cool, wet spring, with a damp chill almost all the way through May? Will we get early heat and not enough rain to satisfy the gardener in me? Will it be a picture-perfect climb from the depth of winter to the height of summer?
Probably not the last; here in the Midwest, spring, like fall, is a volatile season, usually featuring wide, rapid swings in temperature and conditions. That’s why I like the transitional seasons; there’s something exciting about living somewhere where we can get all four seasons in one day.
I also like summer, the only season when I can almost always go outside without a coat and not freeze, and winter, with the austere beauty of bare branches silhouetted against the sky. Ask my kids; I’m terrible at picking favorites.
However this spring progresses, the fact that will end in summer is sure. That is something we can count on, just as we can count on Lent ending in Holy Week and Easter, just as we can count of the promise of salvation.
No wonder Easter, like Passover, takes place in the springtime, in the season of hope and the season of new life, of things unseen and yet believed.
I can’t yet see the crocuses forcing their way up through the soil, let alone the daffodils and tulips that will follow. But I know the bulbs that have been there for years and the new bulbs I planted in the fall — at least the ones the squirrels didn’t eat — are there, and will bloom into flowers to greet the season.