Winter, at last, could achieve only a final gasp one late-March day in southern New England. It left a thin mantle of wet snow gathering and slumping on the lower edges of our woodshed roof, rumpled like the skin of a lazy hound.
In the quiet, steady dripping from the eaves was a whispered denial of defeat, faint but discernible — and a pledge to return.
But this was not a monologue. Another voice spoke of the promise for warmth and rain. Though full of potential for every bit as much fury as its icy sibling, it was a welcome visitor and harbinger of a yearly ecological rite, one observed by a suite of organisms to which we can add another group — humans.