An unexpected dose of spring
- pcbaxter
- Mar 27
- 2 min read

Last month I flew to Charlotte, NC to visit my son, daughter-in-law, and their 11-month-old baby. I knew from checking the local weather online to expect temperatures to climb out of the 40s into the 50s and 60s, and even to reach 70 on the last day of my visit. I removed the nubby-textured, long-sleeved tees I’d already packed in my suitcase and replaced them with short-sleeved tees. Exchanged a heavy hoodie for a lightweight one. I was prepared.
And yet I wasn’t. Somehow, I’d forgotten that warmth is more than a temperature, especially at this time of year. In this instance, in my five-day time in the south, warmth meant daffodils blooming and cardinals singing up a storm at sunrise. It meant that ineffable sense of life returning to the barren-looking land. It meant a feeling of expanse and ease, heading out for walks with the baby without needing a hat, mittens, or even the lightweight hoodie I’d brought.
The experience surprised me. Winter, with its invitation to turn inward to home and hearth, homemade soups and bread, is a favorite season of mine. I had no idea that a brief burst of spring would nudge my psyche in the way that it did.
In this other environment about 500 miles south of my home, I felt inspired to get up and out early. Not just to refill the backyard bird feeders and then retreat indoors as I would on the frigid late-winter mornings back in Pennsylvania, but to get out and take a walk. Look for spring bulbs coming up in neighbors’ gardens. Pay more attention to birdsong. Even to think, “What do I want to write next?” in a way that doesn’t happen during the cold winter months.
And of course, the sunlight and warmth and birdsong made me think about my own garden and what I want to grow in it this year. I started having visions of peas, leaf lettuce, and seed potatoes. I started thinking of spring rains and the soil warming up just enough to coax tiny seeds into softening their protective coats to begin the transformation into living, growing plants. I thought about how plants take the raw materials of air, water, earth, and fire (the energy of the sun) to transform plain old dirt into food for us. It’s alchemy at both its simplest and most complex.
Spring is a reminder to me that we’re inextricably connected to the land because the land literally becomes us. How is it possible to ever forget this?
“I have never resented being told I was made out of dust, which really means soil, for to have the same origin as the flowers and trees is a very fine thing indeed, and makes us cousins to the violet and sisters of the oak.”
—Hanna Rion, Let’s Make a Flower Garden, 1912