February Thaw
It was early February, that Saturday morning when I went down to the creek. The sun shone from a blue sky, feeling somehow brighter and more cheery that it had in several months. The snow crunched hard under my feet as I walked to the tree line. Snow that has sat many weeks, settling, melting a little, and refreezing, has a particular hard crunch. It is old snow, the snow of winter’s end.
At the tree line the ground drops sharply in a steep embankment and I pick my way down among the trees and snow. Down in the creek bed the morning sun is high above. Though the air feels warm already, signaling the first really warm day of the year, the creek still shows the mark of winter’s cold. The creek is almost wholly encased in ice, and still covered with snow. Looking at the creek by itself is like looking at some frozen northern tundra.
But all was not quite as frozen as a first glance might suggest. Here and there a fissure or opening in the ice revealed the burbling, hurrying, flow of water. It is the sort of situation that little children are sternly admonished (with good reason) to completely avoid. But since the water was only knee deep on me I continued on with only the risk of getting my feet cold and wet.
I consider February the beginning of the turning. December plunges you in the deep blackness and cold of winter. January wallows there, as if it will never end. And only with February do we begin to see the first signs of the turn toward spring. First there are the little hints: The noticeably longer days, the greater amount of sunshine that somehow seems stronger, and more hopeful. But then, unexpectedly, there comes the February thaw. It is that brief burst sometime in February–maybe only a day, maybe a few–when the temperatures soar and a world seemingly frozen in time comes back to life and begins to limber itself for the coming year. The cold returns after the February thaw, it always does. But after that thaw, the secret is out. Spring is coming, soon. And it can’t be stopped.
By the end of that warm Saturday in early February, the ice had broken up on the creek.
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