Monday morning, on my way from the house to the car, I surveyed the meager archipelago of ice and snow, literally giving ground to the late February sun. Exactly a week before, all of Connecticut was under two feet of snow, and this same trip to the car had been a trial. The trip in the car… well, forget about it.

The nor’easter of February 12 looked like a knockout punch to the delicate tips of daffodils, the tumescent magnolia buds, and spring’s various other emissaries emboldened by January’s extended thaw. But this week, the last of the snow is timidly hiding in the shadows behind the barns and beneath the shrubbery. Winter is beginning to look a little weak.

We are now getting about the same amount of sunlight that we had on those sparkling October days when leaves, and not snowdrifts, were piling up in the yard. Everything is leaning toward spring. Whatever snowstorms this winter has left in it will be quickly sacrificed to a lost cause, and the natural world knows it.

New England’s roads are made for drivers. There are few of the sky-intensive flatlands and to-the-horizon straightaways found in other areas of the country that inspired the creation of cruise control. Our landscape was churned up by the Laurentide Ice Sheet 13,000 years ago, and road builders have spent the last 300 years making their way through the chop with liberal use of curves, switchbacks, dips, and rises. Driving is always an adventure; a new world comes at you around every corner.

These days, however, I often ask Kate to drive so I can sit in the passenger’s seat, which in February is the prime position for time traveling.

The woods are open and bare, and from the perspective of a moving car one can see deeper into the landscape than a stationary observer. The rush of foreground trees for the speeding traveler renders them transparent. They sweep by so quickly that they barely register in the eye. Objects deep in the woods, snagged in the slower shift of their distant perspective, become more visible as a result.