Winter has been overly kind to us here on the south coast of Massachusetts this year. Perhaps this is Nature’s way of apologizing for last winter’s endless snowstorms and brutally cold temperatures. In New England, however, we doubt such things. Our Puritan past reminds us that weather like this is merely setting us up for some massive payback in the weeks ahead.

Last year’s weather suited my mood. My soul was frozen by the numbness of grief. It was as though I had to prove something. Each snowstorm forced me to reopen the pathway to my wife’s grave. The cold winds pummeled me as I stood by her grave trying to make sense of what had happened. Everything was drenched in metaphor.

There have been times this winter the weather has been contrary to my state of mind. Much of January and February were difficult for me. The numbness of a year ago has worn away–and facing loss without that numbness has been difficult.

But a poet should be more attuned to what the world is saying to him than I have been. I should have seen the early arrival of the crocus shoots and the sudden rising of the daffodils as the Earth’s way–as Jane’s way–of telling me it was time to wake up and get on with not just the work in front of me, but with the life as well. The eternal Narnian winter has begun to melt–and the white witch of grief has begun to lose her hold.

This is not to say that I am done with grief–far from it. Depression and sadness still grip me–and will still rule me–at times. I am not fool enough to think a single flower stalk represents an end to the deep emotional ties between my wife and me. Those ties are eternal. And I cannot escape the long silences her absence creates. Rather it is the beginning of the end of this awful paralysis that has stunted everything I attempt.

That paralysis is not gone. Everything I do is still an enormous struggle. I still keep having to add more things to my list every day than I can take off it. And even things I know are critical do not always make it to the top of the list by the end of the day. Going to bed and getting out of bed still remain among the hardest parts of the day.

But where once everything was stagnant–where every move left me feeling like a fly caught in slowly drying amber–something has begun to change. What that change is, where it will lead, I do not know.

But spring is coming. There may still be horrible storms to get through, awful cold to endure–and this positive energy I feel may shrivel in those days the way I worry about a sudden cold snap killing off the promise of those first shoots–but the sun rises a little earlier each day and sets a little later.

It is time to plan the garden and start some seeds.