Sounds of the season

 Some folks in Tennessee plant sweet peas on Valentine’s Day, even if they have to brush the snow away. I spent the week digging out the garden beds, just so they’ll be ready whenever the Wise Woman decides to plant.

When the week began, the garden was quiet. I listened mostly to the song of my shovel. As the week progressed, the birds started singing. By the weekend, the birds were jamming. We had three species of woodpeckers in the rhythm section.

Thoreau, hearing a nuthatch in early spring, noticed that much of the nuthatch’s music sounded like the drumming of a woodpecker. It was as if the nuthatch, as a fledgling, had learned part of the score from the woodpecker. Thoreau got lost in that line of thought and said:

 

It was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring.

 

I imagine we’ll have another cold snap. But I also found the handle.

• Source: The quotation is from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, March 5, 1859. I found it in Thoreau’s Animals, edited by Geoff Wisner; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017, p. 6.