Spring Revisited

         I step out my back door and gaze at an endless ocean of white. Multiform icy crystals joined together by the thousands form myriad dunes, craters, and peaks in every direction my eyes wander. As if living sculptures, they are constantly moving, shifting, and reforming. Like grains of cosmic dust entrapped in ceaseless motion throughout time, carried by eternal solar winds, so is the drifting snow around me.

         Similar to a lunar landscape, so is this cold, bleak, and barren stretch of forsaken earth. The only breaks are a few trees, now stripped bare of their brightly colored fall coats of reds, yellows, and browns. Looking like arthritic hands reaching up from cold, forgotten graves, they push out of the frozen ground with twisted and gnarled fingers, scratching ruthlessly at the perpetual north wind that stole away their emerald season of life.

         High above them, dismal frozen clouds create a chill and lifeless canopy between the distant horizons. A ceiling of ominous gray darkness so dismal, it seems to steal away all hope and vitality, leaving in it’s place only disheartening gloom and helpless depression. It engulfs the world fully, pressing down with a weight so heavy it crushes all hopes and dreams, threatening even to one's soul and spirit.

         There is no sound that interrupts the incessant wailing of the north wind, just as there is no break in the impenetrable gray of the sky. But wait! There, in the distant western sky, just inches above the horizon, an area of gray is lightening, is brightening. Even as I watch, a small ember of glowing sunlight burns through the gray barrier of lifelessness. First only a spark in the darkness, then one finger of light, then two, then three.

         Within minutes the western sky is shredded into strips of gray, scattered across a faint blue sky as the sun relentlessly tears at them. A glowing ball of yellow, it suspends heavenly for a few minutes before crashing into the distant horizon setting both sky and ground ablaze with streaks of crimson, orange, yellow, and pink.

         The ground begins to open up and swallow the fiery orb, as a shrill and savage scream rips through the wintry silence around me. At first just a dot circles and dips in the fiery western sky, but as it moves closer it takes form. A gallant red-tailed hawk glides effortlessly on the unseen currents of air. Again, he shrieks out his challenge to the frozen world below as he slowly soars into the dark eastern horizon. Just before he vanishes into the quickly forming gloom of night, he cries out one last time with fearless defiance in his voice. “Life will soon return; it’s now your time to perish!”

         The crippled fingers of barren trees bow in silent praise to his cry as the cold north wind groans even louder. But, no longer does it carry the bitter howl of triumph over the land it sweeps tirelessly across. No, it’s howl is humbled into a moan of agony, for the wind knows, like the hawk, that soon spring will renew all that was stolen away when it came last winter.

         With the cries of the hawk still echoing in my mind, I smile as I turn to go back inside to the warmth of home and hearth. Looking one last time at the dark horizon where he disappeared I whisper after him, “Soon my friend, all will be revisited.”