By the standards of an eastern Ontario spring it’s early yet. But even still my land is full of promise. This morning, there is the bliss of rain. Not snow, but a cleansing rain.

When I push open my front door, I hear a first robin singing. (In these uncertain times of avian flu and encroaching greed, each returning bird is blessed.)

Raising my face to the sky and the wind–a south wind today, I drink in a new song, the sound of the thrumming gusts racing through the fat-budded maples. I feel the delight of  knowing that, from now until summer, every day the music will change as these buds blossom and the leaves swell.

Before I step back inside, I catch sight of a first turkey vulture scudding by, tilting his wings. How could I have forgotten how exquisite his flight is?

I don’t want to miss a minute of all the changes.

There will be stirrings, like the snowdrop spears thrusting up through half-frozen leaf mould, but also cruel regressions as the standing water returns to ice. I will wake to lichens and moss and boulders revealed. (These are the boulders which were drawn from the basement during the thrilling days when our home was built.  “–Where do you want us to put these?” And, since those first days in their new places they have been my companions.)

Late in the day, I slip out again into the cold clear air. Skeins of geese like smoke, heavy with weariness, are circling and circling in sunset, searching for open water on the nearby lake.

On this day, there is a glow, a shininess everywhere.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God, wrote one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manly Hopkins.

As the promise of my northern spring creeps and rushes in, for all the fear and sorrow, as he says nature is never spent.