Missing spring

Winter has been wonderful. But this evening I realized how much I miss the birds. Temperatures were near 70 degrees today. There's tiny tufts of green poking out from beneath nearly rotted leaves. Leaves that have been pressed beneath five or six feet of snow, wet white snow. Snow that has been reduced to frozen slices of driftwood-colored logs scattered here and there. Separating the fallen logs of snow, brown and wet remnants of last fall.

But the birds. Songs of spring, not yet a full choir, but enough to recall the sounds of summer. Little white moths appearing out the corner of an eye. Turkeys and pheasants doing their mating dance in the newly rutted road, slowly drying like furrowed clay platters at the hand of a potter, fired by the sun.

It feels like it's time.