The rise and fall of our planet’s tilting waltz around the sun moved the angle of our inclination to our favorite star across the equator to northern latitudes earlier this month. This was just after we engaged in our semi-annual compulsion to tinker with time. The vernal equinox and the return of Daylight Savings Time combined to flood the early evening hours with light. The evening daylight, of course, is not saved at all; it is simply stolen from the morning.

After struggling for months to free ourselves from the folds of winter’s dark cloak, we were finally getting up with the sun in late February and early March, until, that is, the recoil of the great spring spring-ahead kicked us early risers back into the blue hour.

The blue hour is what the French call that twilight time between the total darkness of night and sunrise when light has a quality dissociated from both day and night – not black, not white, but blue.  The implication is that being discrete, apart from the normal cycle of hours, this time is special – auspicious, even.

Why should spring be any different from the rest of us?

I know when I awaken from a long, deep sleep, there’s a little unpleasantness – in my temperament, my general aspect, and, ok, my breath, too. I try to recover my composure and comportment quickly before too many people notice. First impressions are important.

So when the vernal equinox reminds winter dreamers to rise and shine, some of the first to poke their heads from beneath their leaf-litter comforter are, let’s admit it, a little rank.

The skunk cabbage is up. Their claret colored cloaks twist up out of marshlands caked with ice and corn snow, looking like netherworld minions still steaming from a recent dip in the River Styx. And what’s that smell?

Symplocarpus foetidus is indeed fetid, not to mention a little feverish. It sweats its way up out of the frigid mud of March through cellular respiration, a metabolic process that enables it to generate temperatures perceptibly higher than the ambient air temperature. (Stick your finger in one, and see for yourself.) It is not uncommon in early March to see newly emerged skunk cabbage spathes standing on an island of thaw in an ocean of freeze.

The blossoms of these springtime stinkers are encased in the thick encircling spathes, which they wear like the hoodie of a surly teen. The foul “skunk” odor that rises on the intemperate heat mimics carrion, attracting flies as pollinators.

Spring is an old friend, and I’m more than willing to overlook this initial unpleasantness each year. To my winter-weary eye, any plant emerging from the March mud is beautiful. By April, I may be a little more discerning, but for now I love the smell of skunk in the morning.

Snow drops

South of here, winter was piling on, adding another foot of snow to mid-Atlantic states that cried uncle weeks ago. It was snowing here, too – hard at times. But on a foray into the worst of it last Friday, carrying trash from the house to the barn, I felt the season slip.

Winter in New England is brawny and bare knuckled, but its reputation stands firmly on January and February. In March the season can put on a furious show, but this is the month it goes weak in the knees. Daylight Savings Time and the vernal equinox will administer a technical knock out in a couple of weeks, but standing there last week in a white-out squall, I could feel that for this year, winter’s cause is lost.

It was both warm and wet, and the road out front was black. Heat in the asphalt pushed back against the snowstorm and was winning. Even the least of living things were pushing back. Tender green shoots of snowdrops raised tight translucent buds like clenched fists through the snow. The Lenten rose was forming new blossoms beneath a layer of ice. And olive drab finches were pushing gold from the alchemy of their little electric hearts up through the down on their breasts.