Sandhill

My dog sat sniffing, her piercing predator’s gaze fixed on the valley, as if she had something important to do.  I didn’t get the memo.  So I lay on my back on snow that has melted and refrozen day after day to form a hard pack, snow shoes no longer necessary.  The temperature was rising now, in the evening, though the day had been cold.  In the distance, high up in the sky and out of my frame of reference I heard a sound so familiar I didn’t realize it was foreign, a sound that, according to the fossil record, is 2.5 million years old.  But I hadn’t heard it for a few months.

We only have eyes for one season.  It is hard to imagine summer in winter or winter in summer.  As love does, weather blinds us in intervals.

When the world is all icy-moon-white, green seems a wavelength undetectable to the human eye; swimming more like a latent memory of the womb than something that, in a few months, we could actually do.  How we long to move our naked arms through a pond or lake, hair flailing out around our heads like the stems of a sea-plant, and rise to the surface and dive down again as if between two worlds.  Did we dream this?  Or actually do it? 

Likewise, in summer, we can’t imagine how snow polka-dots the sky, how when it falls it doesn’t make a sound.

So what I heard was a sandhill crane.  It startled me into spring.  And as soon as it did, I forgot I had forgotten that crimson head, that throttling cry.  Winter was gone, like the time before birth.  It was spring, and always had been.