Today might be the day I try to get my car out of the driveway. I haven't been able to move it since March 28; but Tom and Paul spent much of yesterday afternoon beating at the ice pack with shovels and iron bars, so maybe the car will finally have a chance to escape. Driving to the gig on Friday, I saw a single hungry robin fly across the road. Here in my own yard the juncos and the purple finches have returned. The snow pack is still deep, but sun warms the glassed-in porch so that I've been able to dry laundry out there. The air is beginning to soften. I let the fire in the stove die down in the afternoons, and the poodle tracks fresh mud onto floors I've just swept. When I stand on the stoop and gaze out over the snow, the weary bare branches, the rutted tracks, my skin senses what my eyes cannot see: that winter's siege has finally broken.

Elizabeth Bowen writes:

No moment in human experience approaches in its intensity this experience of the solitary earth's. The later phases of spring, when her foot is in at the door, are met with conventional gaiety. But her first unavowed presence is disconcerting; silences fall in company--the wish to be either alone or with a lover is avowed by some look or some spontaneous movement--the window being thrown open, the glance away up the street. In cities the traffic lightens and quickens; even buildings take such feeling of depth that the streets might be rides cut through a wood. What is happening is only acknowledged by strangers, by looks, or between lovers. Unwritten poetry twists the hearts of people in their thirties. To the person out walking that first evening of spring, nothing appears inanimate, nothing not sentient: darkening chimneys, viaducts, villas, glass-and-steel factories, chain stores seem to strike as deep as natural rocks, seem not only to exist but dream.

Bowen writes with an urban eye, an urban romanticism. But even here, so far from her London parks and streets, I feel what she means. Nonetheless, spring in Maine is a difficult birth. When my son called home from college last night, he asked if we would still have snow in June. I hope not, but we might.