The hound and I roam the bog at will for a little while longer. There may be water underfoot but, especially at the shadow end which happens to be our end, below that water is solidity. I am a tiny human perched on top of a frozen sponge — a gigantic saturated sponge frozen stiff. So long as you know were to step and not to step, of course. Most of the time I get that right. The rest of the time I get my feet wet. The hound always gets his feet wet.

We walk down to the bog at its most southern point and trail the western edge, before turning left and uphill to follow the western boundary of our land back home. We’re not shy of crossing the wall, but our neighbor’s back forty is an impenetrable alder jungle that nearly took my eye one year.

The game afoot is inventorying signs of spring. Is this it? Are we there now? Water where ice once was, geese and ducks, damp air. The calendar says the vernal equinox is to occur on March 20^th at 12:30 am EDT. At 12:29 it’s still winter and at 12:31 spring has sprung.

My counting of the signs is a quintessentially human categorizing, weighing, and judging. A reading of the tea leaves for signs. At some point it’s more spring than winter, and that’s it. Renewal is here. We’re no longer watching and recording beauty, as we’ve been doing since December, finally we’ve entered into a world that is doing stuff so as we’d notice so now we’re looking to witness the happening.

But that’s not how it works in the bog. In the bog it is winter and spring both all the time. Just the balance changes. This winter has been one of rain — after yet another rainy melt and runoff the hound and I are crashing and smashing though yet another thin cover of ice perched six inches above the still deeply frozen mud, destroying worlds of slivered sun-catching beauty that would have held us in their spell only a week ago. But they no longer matter in our pressing urge to engage the geese, get wet, experience the ooze and stink of regeneration. We crash some more.

Where all has been dormant for months, no matter the temperature or the state of the water flowing over the bog, now ice recedes a mere inch or two to immediately reveal bits of green and root sprouting. Geese come and geese go. Geese come back. In the littoral zone, winter and spring are a mere couple of inches apart and exist at the same time. Winter will be here for a while yet – hiding in shady areas, advancing a bit when the nights dip deeper.

It’s taken me a mere 57 years and most of another to finally get that my incessant categorizing, which I had taken as a smart thing to do, the thing that makes me a human, is in fact the problem. We western humans have no littoral zone of the mind. Is it winter or is it spring? Sea or shore, black or white, wild or tame? Inside the house or out? Male or female? City or forest? And we create landscape in the image of our minds. In that human world the bog being neither land nor lake has no identity, no way of existing. We have no way of existing with it, doing something with it. We find it comforting to force it to be one or the other, art or nature, measured by our image thereof. Drain or dam.

—

Without snow cover to slowly melt, there’s a lot less work to do than in some other years and spring is wasting no time in gaining a foothold. No time wasted on the transition, the gurgling and the rushing and the running of the water away to the Atlantic, the slow, slow awakening.

I kneel by one of the old beaver dams, now a gorgeous step in the water, trying to get the waterproof autofocus camera to focus away from the obvious in the middle of the image, trying to fool it so it will slow its shutter speed and show the motion. It takes a while to scramble its intent. It’s a mere excuse, really, to have a chance to hear the this year’s gurgling in this dammette, the honking of seven geese out on the water in the background, sun warming my neck. Wet knees.

Time to put away the sugaring gear and order the seeds.