Spring

Early spring in Montreal.

It looks a little bit like Antarctica:

Except for all the plants.  Frozen under, sprouting through crusts of ice and squelching in the mud: so many plants.  So much chlorophyll, waiting for the sunshine.

Some of the animals are already into it before the snow thaws.

Others, like this raccoon, seem to need a little moment to gather themselves.  He was standing three feet off the cross-country ski path, blinking blandly and looking like he might need a cup of coffee.

No coffee necessary for the waxwing; he's already dressed for the party.

Ditto the great blue heron, the redwing blackbird and the pileated woodpecker… all spotted within Montreal city limits.  

I think I'm going to like life in Quebec.  The people, like those year-round resident birds and early returning migrants, don't seem to stand on ceremony when it comes to celebrating the season.  The first day the thermometer crept up past freezing, our unknown neighbor, red-nosed and mittened in the still-brisk air smiled at us broadly on the street and proclaimed, "Le printempts est ici!"  Or anyway, that's what I think he said… I've got a long way to go on my French.

After securing ourselves an apartment in our new city, Tyler and I spent several weeks in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine, watching spring unfold further.  It started with the skunk cabbage, and quickly proliferated from there… oh, the plants!  The plants of spring!  How can anyone bear so much green and yellow and color?  Suffer brightly with me:

We watched the forest blossom, blueberry barrens buzzing with bees, the tiger swallowtail butterflies clinging to the northern bush honeysuckle.  The columbine, the fringed polygala and the lady slipper peeking from between the umbrellas of the wild sarsaparilla.  We ate several rounds of fiddleheads, powering up with forest nutrients, and then cracked the guidebooks, trying to learn about everything around us.  One month ago I could name only a dozen wildflowers, but in the weeks since, I have listed 50 or so from around the midcoast region of Maine.  The names of trees are coming more slowly, perhaps because I have to look up and away from the wildflowers to study them closer.  The birds are all hidden in the foliage, and we took to lying on the dock and staring back up at the canopy, waiting for warblers to hop briefly between perches.  A glimpse of bright yellow almost always meant a Yellow Warbler, but closer looks occasionally reveal Pine Warblers or Goldfinches.  In lieu of definitive glimpses, we began to get better at identifying bird calls.  The most ethereal bird call in the entire forest is the Hermit Thrush.  For weeks, they haunted our hikes, sounding like magic flutes beckoning us deeper into the forest.  Then, Julia and Schuyler came to visit, and Julia, who is normally busy cramming her brain with the finer points of grammatical structure in ancient languages, confidently identified the Hermit Thrush as the only bird she knew by song.  The Ovenbird, the Eastern Wood Peewee… we know a few now.

And in between studying bird calls, botany and French, we went swimming.