Signs Of Appalachian Spring

Front Porch View of Floyd County Spring The coming of spring at our house is not measured by length of day or temperature. It is not the blooming of Coltsfoot (come far too early this year) or pinking of the buds at the tips of trees along Nameless Creek that signals spring to us. The first day of spring at my house is marked by the afternoon or evening of our first meal of the year on the front porch.   This year, it was she--the irresistible force--who insisted: Let’s eat outside! And I--the pseudo-immovable object: it’s too cool yet, and everything is wet from the rain. But there’s a break in the storm, the air warms suddenly, but more rain is coming.   It is chilly for sitting, but she insists. I relent, and a flannel shirt for the evening is just enough. Before she comes to sit, I stand and listen. Beneath the raucous sound of the creek, spring hums underground. I feel it through my slippers, in the soles of my feet. This month is to June as early morning is to noon: there is not much color or warmth yet in the day or the year. But the sun rises sooner and stays longer, beaming layers of pigment onto the diluted palette of February. The late March breeze carries the earthsweet scent of warming soil, tousles the spindly spicebush just starting to bud along the creek. The pasture grass is smooth as a putting green painted butterscotch, pressed down by winter, flat as pancake batter. Five black crows move erratically back and forth across the field like ice skaters, leaning forward, arms tight against their sides, gliding in the twin choreography of hunger and curiosity. There is a blessed peace in watching this panorama from the stage of our own front porch. In bowls on our laps, the casserole (with the chicken we canned ourselves last fall) warms us even while the winds follow the storm south, down beyond the end of the pasture, surging like a wave out across the Blue Ridge, spilling down into the piedmont and beyond. Behind the wave, a neon strobe of pink flashes in the neardark. Thunder follows by and by, the sluggish complaint of the instant light and heat that spoke it. There: the smell of lightning.   And listen: how very Appalachian, this thunder. Remember: in South Dakota, the storm passed over us, crashing it’s way toward the Badlands. For being so very close and loud, it was but a brief exclamation, monotone and two dimensional--a sheet of sound dropped down hard against prairie, flat and open to the horizon in every direction. In our mountain valley, thunder is a discourse, declaration and rebuttal, ridge beyond ridge.   CLAP! And we hold to our warm bowls, listening. Mountain Thunder in stereo, reverberating with more than mere percussion: antiphonal thunder kettle drums answered by two or more pairs of tympanis back on Lick Ridge, set at fifths. Tonal heavy hammers strike steel against steel out beyond Copper Hill. Sound sent out and back again, modulated, amplified, and moving away. The pink-orange cumulus spills down the great escarpment toward Carolina as Goose Creek rises clear and cold, to its own water music. Appreciative and silent, we take our empty bowls inside.