Yesterday afternoon I sat outside on the stoop, in the sunshine, for 10 minutes, without dying of exposure. I might snag 15 minutes out there today. Although the temperature is currently 10 degrees, it's forecast to rise to 40. But rain is on the way for tomorrow, and we still have several feet of snow on the ground. The result will be a mess. At least it will be a change.

In Harmony, at the end of March, the sap still hasn't started running in the maple trees. Gardens are hidden under snow, firewood piles are dwindling, and the big watershed rivers--the Penobscot, the Kennebec--are jammed with icebergs. Slivers of bare ground show in a few open fields where gales have torn away the snow. But a few yards further down the highway, the plow piles are so high that passing drivers can't see anything beyond them.

Everywhere, the tarmac is buckling. Town thoroughfares are pitted with holes. "Bump" warnings decorate the roadsides; "Heavy loads limited" warnings glimmer on the telephone poles. There are too many warnings to notice. Anyway, if you took your eyes off the road to read them, you'd hit the next frost heave too hard.

"This is the season of mud and trash, broken limbs and crushed briers," said Hayden Carruth. 

"Defeats and victories and / Sunlight licking the frosted windows," said Baron Wormser.

"Everything is an argument," I said.

But "I'll tell you how the Sun rose," said Emily Dickinson. And now I remember last night's moon, narrow and new, curled like a cat in a chair, framed in the windowpane above my bed.

[The Carruth line is from "Birthday Cake," in Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey; the Wormser lines are from "Mulroney," in Mulroney and Others; my line is from "Spring on Ripley Road," in Same Old Story; the Dickinson line is from Poem 318.]