I carry my laptop out the backdoor of Hardwick’s coffee shop. A couple I know pulls up on their fat tire bikes and rave about the biking. There’s an adage in Vermont that the state’s fifth season is mud season. The first week of March is way early for the back roads to break up. Most towns post their roads around March 15, prohibiting heavy trucks, like log or delivery trucks, from destroying already soft roads. Now, towns have already posted these warnings, ribboned with orange survey tape, a sure sign that winter is on the wane.

I meet a friend at a former golf course now owned by the city of Montpelier where people let their dogs run. The course is last year’s brown grass, but when I squint I can see emerging green beginning shimmer, pushing back the dull amber. How much the world leans into living.

My oldest daughter calls from New Mexico, on her journey to visit the grandparents. Through our phones, her face glows with desert light. I think of her driving around Santa Fe, this old adobe city and the stunning landscape an infinitely complex story that stretches so far back. Within that human history, my own family story lodges in with its numerous plot points. Ah, family… never a straight line.

T. S. Eliot wrote of that April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm… Mud season may be the least loved. But in my mind, it’s the sweetest. Sap runs. The softening ground sucks our boots into its stickiness. Tender green unfurls, strengthens. We move, onward.