May is coming. Tell us, tell us, please that warm weather is close at hand. Despite Mother Nature's cruel trick last week of returning us to wintry temperatures, the signs of welcome change are around us. Winter's silence has been replaced with the opening chords of spring's eventual cacophony. The trickling of upcountry snowmelt has renewed the currents in the river.
Optimistic birds provide a trill or two.
But most hopeful of all is the unmistakable smell of spring. Former New York Times nature editorial writer Hal Borland writes of this in a collection of his editorials called Twelve Moons of the Year . The precise date is unpredictable, but one warm afternoon the change is in the air, winter turning to spring, and it is more than sunlight, more than warmth. It is the fertile smell of leaf mold and rotting twigs in a woodland, a rich, damp, vegetative odor. It is the clean, silty smell of flowing water at a brookside, the misty smell of wet stones, the dam, almost green smell of moss.