Green is coming

It is not yet a haze around the maple tree, or even a blade of fresh grass, but it is coming, I know. I saw it in the Hudson River, and smelled its freshness in the new tide that barreled in from the Atlantic, and climbed the rocks that line the seawall at Battery Park. As the tide swam out, fresh green mosses and algaes fell against those same rocks, like a mermaid’s hair, silky and long.

On the Delaware, the ice has moved out again, for the second time this season, and now kayaks take fishermen to the spot where they were ice-fishing a week ago. That water, too, shows signs of green spring, replacing its stern gray facade of winter.

This is my season, spring. Born to May, like the lambs, I feel reborn each time the season returns. It is nature’s gift, trumping any man-made disasters, giving the spirit reason to soar again.

In the city, park workers groom and prune the landscape along the Hudson. Central Park, employing hundreds, is a fine lady being dressed by her humble servants. Walking among them, I want to join their ranks, eager to be active in that noble work, and too far from my own few acres upstate.

There is precious little time for a weekender with much to do. The woodchucks and squirrels are my rural landscapers. They know they have the whole of mid-week to scavenge and plunder my carefully planted bulbs. Even my deer-proof Japanese rhododendrons are not guaranteed against an unguarded yard.

But green is coming.

Soon, the drive up will be a calendar of the season. While Riverside Park in Manhattan is showy with pink blossoms and bright forsythia, the gentle yellow-green buds of the trees on the Palisades will mix with the sun’s brightening light to make a perfect picture of spring in the Hudson Valley. By the time we reach Sullivan County, two hours later, only the farmer’s fields will be green. The city has a two-week jump on spring, for all the good it does a loft-dweller with no square inch of soil to dig, no tree visible outside the kitchen window.

Often, with less than 24 waking hours to spend in the country, tending nature’s disarray takes a back seat to the pleasures of making poetry or art, or to the fine art of window-sitting.

Last weekend, my husband and I woke simultaneously, to a glorious dawn breaking over the river. It was 5:30 a.m.—long before our Saturday mornings usually begin—but some pixie had touched us both to show us this sight, a gift from the heavens.

Then my husband spied a large bird on the river. This was no eagle. It floated along like the mergansers, but it was huge, white, with a yellow bill. It was a mute swan, cousin to the trumpeter, but not native to North America, and considered invasive as it has no natural predators in this part of the world. It glided along quietly, mutely, for a while. Then, as if sensing our gaze, it lifted its giant wings and flew off, incongruously, like a spruce goose, its wing span a good eight feet of feathered sinew and bone. The show over, we slumbered again.

Window-watching is good sport in these parts, so unlike the city version, which usually only occurs in response to a persistent car alarm or other loud commotion. The other night, on a late-night walk with Aengus, our Schnauzer, I was startled by a pack of rats huddling among the garbage bags awaiting pickup. Uncontrollably, I screamed. A good, loud, piercing scream. Aengus looked up at me, the rats scrambled to safety, and when it was over, I looked up at the windows that lined the street. Not one opened. So much for the lessons of Kitty Genovese, I thought.

No matter, green is coming.