Rabbits are breeding as wild multiflora roses begin sprouting their first leaves

Pay total attention to the polyphony of the birds and wind outside, the occasional plane that flies overhead, the patter of rain on a window. Listen carefully, and notice how listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love.

— Stephen Batchelor, The Art of Solitude

Astronomical data and lore

The Great Groundhog Moon becomes full at 3:17 on February 27. Rising in the evening and setting in the morning, this moon passes overhead in the middle of the night, encouraging creatures to be most active around that time, especially as the cold fronts of February 28 and March 3 approach.

Venus continues to travel retrograde in March passing from Capricorn to Aquarius. Jupiter and Saturn remain in Capricorn, preceding Venus before dawn. In this configuration, Jupiter is the first major Morning Star (Saturn being far less prominent), and Venus rises just before the sun.

Mars moves retrograde from Aries to Taurus in March, and it continues to be the red Evening Star. Another red object in Taurus is Aldebaran, the brightest star of the Hyades constellation within Taurus. On the evening of March 22, Mars and Aldebaran will appear to be almost side by side. Aldebaran will be the twinkling red object.

Weather trends

Major March weather systems usually cross the Mississippi River on March 2, 5, 9, 14, 19, 24 and 29. Lunar perigee on March 2, so close to full moon on February 27 will bring severe weather to the first week of the month, rains in the South, snow in the North. Full moon on March 28 and lunar perigee on March 30 will likewise cause meteorological disruptions for the end of the month. New moon on March 13 is likely to bring middle March storms.

Zeitgebers

(Events in nature that tell the time of year)

Cardinals are singing near 6:40 a.m. Wild violet leaves begin to grow when the snow melts.

Migrant crows return with their young. Chipmunks come out to play and mate in the sun. Rabbits are breeding as wild multiflora roses sprout their first leaves.

The steelhead salmon run comes to a close in Lake Erie. Carp mate in the river shallows. Feeding seasons begin for walleye, sauger, saugeye, muskie, bass and crappie.

Sweet corn has been planted along the Gulf coast. Redbuds and azaleas are in full bloom in Georgia, rhododendrons just starting to come in. In the lowlands of Mississippi, swamp buttercups are open, violets and black medic, too.

Measure the height of hyacinths, daffodils and tulips. Note the color and size of lilac and other buds. Count the number of pussy willows emerged. Check for chickweed greening in the bushes. Spring does not necessarily arrive with warm weather; it is the accumulation of individual events that finally overwhelm the winter.

Countdown to spring

Less than a week before the beginning of the morning robin chorus before sunrise.

Two weeks to early daffodil season and silver maple blooming season

Three weeks to the first wave of blooming woodland wildflowers and the very first cabbage white butterflies

Four weeks until golden forsythia blooms in town and skunk cabbage sends out its first leaves in the wetlands

Five weeks until the peak of Middle Spring wildflowers in the woods, and crab apples flower.

Six weeks until American toads sing their mating songs in the night.

Seven weeks until tulip time in the garden and toad trillium time in the woodlands

Eight weeks until the Great Dandelion and Violet Bloom begins

Nine weeks until azaleas and snowball viburnums and dogwoods bloom

Ten weeks until iris and poppies and daisies come into flower

Mind and body

The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, rises gradually to the lower 70s by the end of February (the last time they climb so high in this first half of the year). Even though the nights are shortening quickly and the odds for decent weather improve by the day, the waxing moon at perigee becomes full as February ends, increasing the chances of seasonal affective disorder. Then comes March, and the Index declines quickly to 59 by next weekend. For full S.A.D. statistics, consult Poor Will’s Almanack for 2021.

In the field and garden

Before spring growth begins, spray ash, bittersweet, fir, elm, flowering fruit trees, hawthorn, juniper, lilac, linden, maple, oak, pine, poplar, spruce, sweet gum, tulip tree, and willow for scales and mites.

Apply more fertilizer to trees, shrubs and perennial beds. Water the earth thoroughly in order to get everything off to a good start.

Normal average temperatures break 32 degrees throughout the lower Midwest, and many tulips, hyacinths and lilies of the valley are emerging from the ground.

Winter wheat is greening and developing in the fields, offering a patchwork promise of April.

Mares show signs of estrus, as the days grow longer. The last of the lambs and kids conceived in middle autumn are born.

Plant sweet peas and the first row of regular green peas directly in the garden, as conditions permit.

Make plans to sell kids and lambs to the Easter Market at the end of March and in early April

Journal

The world we inhabit is not…a determinable set of objective processes. It is our larger flesh, a densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience. It is a sensitive sphere suspended in the solar wind, a round field of sentience sustained by the relationships between the myriad lives and the sensibilities that compose it.

— David Abram

Riding the new spring, I feel nostalgia through daffodils and crocuses. In between the flowers, nostalgia is an ether that carries mood and meaning, an interstitial habitat that grows and dies, its apparent forward motion deceptive because it brings back the past with each pace toward summer.

Nostalgia lies between the details, between the items of the litany of events, loading each event, referring each marker to somewhere else, making zeitgebers of blossoms attached to things that might have been, and to things that were.

My nostalgia confuses the individual particles of the spring, blurring their edges until they become like morning fog. Memories rise and fall, and nostalgia thins and filters them, allowing them in and out of the porous self, rushing in with tides of storms of crises and then ebbing away, the pendulum always evocative, a recollective presence like the residue of a dream, plot and actors forgotten.

And are we really separate from the acts of spring or do we swim inside them, or are we made from them? Are we the ocean and the shore together?

Are we the waves or the water of the waves, the wind or the air itself ? Preordained by the cosmos of seasons, by lost borders of daffodils and crocuses, we float within such vastness, find sweetness from flower to flower like early bees.