Tease

A red-winged blackbird teeters on one of last season's cattails in a drainage ditch along the road. A "v" of geese flies overhead. In the distance, a sandhill crane calls. Two robins land on the matted, wet grass. Sap buckets sprout from the maple tree. These are all clichés, I know, but I let myself fall hard anyway. I make big plans for a hike--same trail, same distance, but something is different.

I wear an old pair of boots. The evening before--even though the temperature was below 32 degrees--when I set out with my dog for the hill behind the house, we soon found the cornfield was no longer frozen. The mud took us in: me to the ankle and my dog to the belly. My boots are still drying in the foyer.

Today in the woods it is warmer, but the trail, which I've packed hard with walking all winter, is like a bobsled track. It's a single line of ice topped with a thin coat of water through the otherwise snow-less forest, the width of a man and as long as a man can care to travel. I am forced to walk not on the trail, but beside it. As if to spite me, it warns, "Don't rush things." This happens every year. The last ribbon of winter rests just where I want to put my feet.

And that is March. Like a fickle lover, it pulls you in one moment and the next it keeps you at bay. You can be sunk in it, mud like batter for some kind of recipe and you a key ingredient. Or you can be forced to inch along the periphery, dangerously close to where you want to be.