It’s the first day of spring. Where I’m from that usually means the sun has been out and been warm for a bit, off and on, the snow is usually gone, and people are starting to talk about planting a few things. But there’s no precedent for that here. Instead, we have Sheilagh’s Brush. We’ve had three inches of snow today, and it is still coming down, a bit wetter than earlier maybe, a bit heavier, but the porches and cars and trees are covered in a few inches of heavy snow, heavy snow that has fallen on top of the other inches of heavy snow from the other day.
I’m told that here, this March snowstorm happens almost every year, and that it’s called Sheilagh’s Brush, a last winter blast around Saint Patrick’s Day, a final goodbye from the winter that covers these woods for over half the year each year. They say it is the day when St. Patrick’s housekeeper looks around their little house, realizes the mess, and clears it up by sweeping out the last of the snow.
If I take my hood off and stop to listen, I can hear it: pattering down on the fir needles, on my coat, on the snow in front of me. It hits with slight small pounds, landing on my gloves in perfect translucent circles.
When I go into the dense woods, it is as if she has her own presence, as if she has swept out the snow out from heaven and then come down to watch it fall. Usually she moves through the woods quietly and brightly enough that I cannot see her, but once in a while, when the wind picks up a little, it shakes the snow off the branches, and it falls down in a delicate swirling mist, as if this is where she moves through the woods. It is eerie and beautiful and I feel as if I do not belong, not there, not in that close community of trees and mountains of bright white snow.
And oh, the snow. Piled on top of last week’s snow, and that snow piled on top of last month’s snow, so that now it covers almost all of the small trees, and I glide beside the tops of trees on firm ground.
Being here, in the middle of this silent and heavy woods, where no one else has been and no one else will go, is liberating and freeing and terrifying. It’s like I’m totally alone in the world, and no one else matters or exists, that only the people who walk this specific land matter, and that is only me because it will be only me back here in this clearing.
This aloneness, this fear, this being at the end of the world while under a whole sky of snow being swept out of heaven is not quite how I am used to spring starting. Not quite like it has looked for me in the past, or maybe like how it is looking for other people that I know. I think almost everyone in the world has had more sunshine than Newfoundland today, and since there has not been a second today when it has not been snowing, nearly everyone has had less snow too.
And so sometimes other people’s beginnings look a bit different than ours. Sometimes it feels like other people’s beginnings are how it is supposed to be, and ours have somehow gone wrong. Maybe their new job or new book or new language has gone beautifully and we feel like we are still stuck in the middle of winter. But beginnings don’t always look like we think they should look, do they? Sometimes beginnings are beautiful, and sometimes when they look differently than we expect, we think that they are not.
But that can’t be true, because there is such beauty here, in the beginning of spring, this first day. In how the snow covered ground is whiter then the cloudy skies, how the deep green of the forests pulls me in, how the snow and ice sparkle on every single branch up every single tree. No, there’s still beauty here, in this beginning of spring that does not seem like a beginning at all.
And we forget sometimes that Newfoundland is not Nebraska, and Newfoundland is not Hawaii, and we are not them, the other people. They have and will start differently, and it will look different, maybe opposite to how we have started.
So we watch the snow on this first spring day, after the beginning has begun, and we keep beginning.
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