This is February, and almost everything lies just below the surface, everything that has been and is still to come, ready to be opened. And my feelings slowly rise through the thaws and freezes and push me out into the sun and the mind of early spring.

Notebook, February 3, 2004

THE ASTRONOMICAL OUTLOOK
FOR THE THIRD WEEK OF LATE WINTER
The Singing Cardinal Moon becomes completely full at 9:49 a.m. on February 9, bringing more cardinals into song, and spurring on more doves and tufted titmice to join them. A partial eclipse of the moon will occur at moonset (just before dawn) on that date.The moon wanes throughout the remainder of the period, coming into its final quarter on February 16 at 4:37 p.m. Rising in the evening and setting in the late morning, this moon lies overhead near sunrise.

NOTES ON THE MID-FEBRUARY THAW
The earth lies out now like a leopard, drying her lichen and
Moss spotted skin in the sun, her sleek and variegated hide.

Henry David Thoreau

I took inventory of the garden in the afternoon before the thaw arrived last week, gibbous moon high in the east. Six to ten inches of snow were still left, now pocked with rabbit tracks, dog tracks and my own footprints. The buds on the lilacs were brown and tight. Hackberries and crab apples and small branches lay on top of the snow, leftovers from the starling flock that had come through the previous day. One green sweet William plant, one sweet rocked were pushing through the ice. Robins were clucking and crows flew over the yard.
On Friday, the wind was straight from the south, chilly at midmorning but mild by the middle of the afternoon, highs finally into the 40s. The sun was bright through the day, and the wind blew all night, shifting to the southwest.
On Saturday morning, cardinals were singing by 7:30. The snow was stubborn but was ceding to the wind. I could walk most of the alley on bare ground, and the oases of open earth were broadening under the trellis and bird feeders and around the sweet Williams and the iris.
The sun disappeared late in the morning, but the thaw did not let up, temperature rising above 50. Bare ground in front of the south wall spreadg toward the pond and the artichoke garden. The south edge of the circle garden showed thyme and fresh deadnettle leaves. Near the bird feeders, the patch of spent birdseed broadened, layers of feedings revealed by the melting snow. Rick Donahoe wrote to say he had seen buzzards, “3 or 4 on a deer carcass out across from Stutzman's,” and that John Whitmore had seen an ovenbird in the Glen (the ovenbird sighting especially interesting since April is usually the earliest they are seen in the area).
The wind held steady through the night, three-fourths of the sidewalk clearing, the patches of ground becoming much more prominent, the brown space beginning to match the snow space, some green showing in the grass, color coming back into the bamboo leaves in the Stafford Street alley.
A cardinal in the back woodlot sang at 7:12 that morning, crows right behind him. Starlings were all around downtown when I went to get the newspaper at 8:30. Out in the country, the morning horizon was hazy with spring. The roadsides and pastures were almost free of snow, but the wooded areas held on to their cold. Runoff filled the ditches.
At South Glen in the afternoon at 4:00, temperature of 45 degrees, the sky robin’s egg blue, I listened to crows and peeping robins and a pileated woodpecker. The frozen river had softened to soft floes shifting away from shore, still held by the curve of the banks. A few small clumps of ice and snow moved by quickly on the high river. Under the trees, the thaw had revealed thousands of box elder seeds, pale dun like a new hatch of winged insects, but the moss on old logs was still matted to the bark, in spite of days of warmth.
The path west into the low sun had lost its hard slickness, was slushy and easy to walk on. Edges between spring and winter were everywhere, the landscape lying out like the variegated hide of Thoreau’s leopard-earth. Extensive holes in the cover had opened around scattered tree trunks and plants, showing clumps of oak leaves, chickweed and sweet rocket, ragwort and great mullein, innumerable honeysuckle berries. By the time I got home, dozens of pussy willows were opening along the sidewalk, and the Singing Cardinal Moon was coming up full over High Street.