The Lengthening Days

Long before the snow thought of leaving, Nyra began to watch the light. It came now a little sooner over the eastern ridge, and it stayed a little later in the west, and the difference each day was almost too small to name. She had counted these small gains for more winters than she could easily hold, and she trusted them the way she trusted her own breath. The cold was still deep, deeper on some mornings than it had been at midwinter, but the light had turned, and the turning of the light came first.

By the middle of each day the sun climbed higher on the ridge than it had a week before, and where it fell full on the southern eaves the frost let go. Water gathered at the tips of the long ice and dropped, one slow bead after another, into the trodden snow below. It was the smallest of thaws, gone again by dusk, freezing hard once the sun had dropped. But Nyra stood beneath the eaves at noon and listened to the dripping, and she named it for what it was, the first loosening of the year’s long hold.

On a bare branch of the old pear tree she found the buds. They had been there all along, folded tight and brown against the winter, but now when she pressed one gently between her fingers she felt the least swelling in it, a fullness that had not been there in the dark months. Nothing showed yet to a passing eye. The change was still hidden, still held inside the wood, but it had begun, and her fingers knew it before her eyes could.

The girl came running one grey morning to say she had heard a bird she did not know, high and clear from the leafless hedge. Nyra listened and knew it, the first of the ones that came back early, before the snow was gone, singing to a garden that was yet asleep. She told the girl, in her low even way, that the bird had not come because the winter was over. It had come because it could feel, somewhere under the cold, that the winter had started to end.

This was the thing she wanted the girl to carry, that the year did not swing round all at once and in the open, with a great melting and a rush of green. It turned first in secret, in the lengthening of the light and the swelling of a bud and the one bird that trusted what it could not yet see, while the snow lay unbroken over everything and the mornings bit as hard as ever. The green would come in its due season, loud and certain and impossible to miss. But by then the true turning would be long past, done quietly in the coldest weeks, when only those who knew how to watch could find it. Hope, she said, was not the green. Hope was learning to read the first small signs of it, and to trust them, in the very depth of the cold.