April On Birch Lake
At the end of a long dreary stretch, I moved
my computer down to a table in the guestroom, primarily because that room has
more natural light and a view of the small lake on which I
live.
As each gray and dreary day
arrived, I even stopped looking out the window: I knew there was ice, it was
gray at the end of winter, and there was no compelling reason to lift my head to
look out.
One morning last week, I
noticed that there was some open water just off the shore, and on my walk I
noted a pair of geese observing the water from the road like two timid swimmers,
afraid of the shock of the cold. I looked to the edge of the receding ice and
saw ducks behaving just like the
geese.
At last, signs of real
Spring, not that awful Mother nature joke she’d played on us the previous
week, she gave us a sweet Sunday full of sun and incipient warmth, followed
immediately by six inches of snow just after dawn on Monday. People were
beginning to talk to themselves, and I was one of
them.
That afternoon, something made
me raise my head and look out toward the lake. In a glance, winter ended,
Spring began, and Summer could not be far
behind.
Just off the shore was the
very first loon of the season….a large bird, with its black and white
stripes up the neck, flattish head, and long beak, serene in the narrow strip of
open water. The loon can only be a loon – it is unique, can’t be
confused with other water birds. At the sight, my heart leaped
up.
Primitive, with a series of
haunting, wailing calls, the sound of a loon seems to connect with the primitive
parts of our brain. One cannot hear the call of a loon without feeling a
frisson of excitement, of delight, of the ageless call of the wild. Once heard,
the sounds of a loon are never
forgotten.
In these northern climes,
the calendar is often irrelevant, and that is why we discuss the weather
endlessly and why the television meteorologists with their gizmos and gadgets
and dopplers still seem to have a sixty percent chance of getting the forecast
wrong, sixty miles either side of a line running between any two points in
Minnesota.
So Spring began here ,
with a loon, swimming in silence.
More than enough, I
believe.
Posted: Mon - November 24, 2003 at 04:41 PM