The day comes when despite all the other tactile signs of winter, you step out to fetch the mail and the air is redolent with the thawing, rotting, liquefying manure spread deep on fields round about, all winter. You pause to give thanks that the only houseguests expected in coming weeks know this as a positive development, themselves. The smell is oppressive, but it's usually gone before it's warm enough to eat or pick out on the front porch, anyway. And then there will be fireflies in the air instead, hatched in the deep brush cover bordering the fields in nature's snowbreaks and in the deer cover lining the low-cutting creek.

A few days later comes the sighing of the mourning doves. This year they run a sweet bass line under the honks of Canada geese who have chosen the ridge that overlooks our little hollow as a resting point on their way to Orillia and points north.

(Amos' well-written line can be taken positively too-- Sap... heck, it's a GOOD thing. This thread itself, calling us to spring, is one sound of sap running in the threads, see? Well done, friend.)

~Susan