It Will All Change In a Few Weeks

I’m ready for the color to return.

I’m tired of all the washed-out hues -- browns, greys and off-whites melding on the horizon into a dull, featureless sky.

Flowers have yet to bloom. Leaves have yet to pop. The residue of winter has yet to be washed from the land by spring rains.

In town, the streets are dirty from a winter of sanding. Yards are showing only the slightest hint of green as four months' accumulation of dog poop makes its appearance after being hidden under the cover of snow.

Friends from other parts of the country post pictures online of their flowering dogwood trees and tulips in bloom. My photos still look like they’re black and white or at best sepia-toned.

At our cabin at Fort Peck Lake last week I sat in the sun on the patio and watched the ice change color from flat white to dark grey as it slowly melted. There was open water between the shore and the ice, enough that I half expected to hear carp splashing in the shallows, but that’s still weeks away.

So is the smell of spring. It’s just too cold.

In a few weeks all that will change. There won’t be a trace of ice or snow, the sterility of winter giving way to the fertility of spring, a scent of mud, water, and new vegetation in the air.

And it will turn green. For a few weeks -- at best a couple of months -- the land will be as verdant as Ireland, the lakes and streams as blue as the sky, the horizon sharp and distinct.

The chokecherries and lilacs will blossom. The cottonwoods will leaf out. We’ll be comfortable in far fewer layers of clothes.

But it seldom lasts long. Too soon the green will fade, replaced by yellows and browns, the blue skies hidden by wildfire smoke.

It depends on the moisture. Doesn’t it always?

And in Montana, there’s seldom enough.

But nonetheless, it’s hard to pray for rain when the snow just melted even if it will put a little color back in the land.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]