In Wyoming, spring can feel more like a series of allusions and suggestions than an actual season. March and April in particular seem to be uncertain if they belong to winter or are the start of something new. Thus, I always look for assurances that spring is here, even if the forecast calls for the imminent arrival of more snow:

1. Red-winged black birds: In March, the red-winged black birds begin calling from the trees, power poles, and fences at the barn where I keep my horse, Scout, which is in the Little Laramie River valley. I also hear them and sight them along the Laramie River where it winds through town. With a trilling whistle that sounds like “okalee” or “conk la ree,” these birds summon spring. https://youtu.be/hrgGTvzuA1I?si=Dx28kLfGA53i4L0Q 

2. Wearing Sandals in 45 Degree Weather: If the sun is out and the temperature rises about 40 degrees, we Wyomingites convince ourselves it is shorts-and-sandal weather, or at least sandal weather. Are my toes cold? Of course, but I can imagine the insinuation of warmth.

3. Summer is Already Booked: In a state where many of us love to be outdoors as much as possible, we also are forced to cram twelve months of warm-weather activities into about four. By mid-April (if not sooner), my email and text threads are full of inquiries and responses regarding summer plans, and my calendar reminds me that there just aren’t that many weekends in June, July, and August.

4. Whispers of Green: In our yard, the cinquefoil and flax are among the first plants to start showing a little green. It creeps up from under the gray-brown thatch of dead leaves left from fall, tiny shoots of new growth, and I have to search for it at first, bending low to the ground as if to hear a secret.

5. Wedding Invitations: Especially if you’re somewhere in the age-range of 25 to 35, or if your kids are, you can bet your mailbox will be full of wedding invitations this time of year (see #3.). Winter weddings in Wyoming are beautiful, but not as common as summer nuptials thanks to wind, bitter cold, and blizzards that close major roadways.  

6.  Meadowlarks: This year, I heard my first meadowlark on April 3^rd. These yellow-bellied, brown-backed, fence-post and sagebrush perchers are my favorite bird, and their fluting, plaintive whistle reminds me of time spent on the Laramie Plains and in the Red Desert as well as of my father and grandfather, who also held a special affinity for their song. Though they’re the state bird of five other states (Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Oregon), they will always call my heart to Wyoming in spring. https://youtu.be/fRgU4xS06sM?si=ewoeoRV1bebpe4ba 

7. Ill-Planned Excursions: Desperate for nicer weather and an opportunity to get out “into the hills” (as my father always put it), the first run of sunny, low-wind days always tempts me to go for a drive, hike, ride, or run into higher country, which usually ends when I encounter enough snow to force me to turn around. (I am learning though — when I was in my twenties, these adventures resulted in getting stuck more than once.)

8. The Horses Start Shedding:  I used to warn them that more snow was sure to come, but it turns out that shedding is triggered by longer daylight hours more than rising temperatures. There is something deeply satisfying about picking up a brush and combing loose hair off a horse’s neck until it begins to pile around your boots. Then, there’s the moment of placing your palm against a soft, sun-warmed, summer-sleek hide.

9. Nocturnal Ranchers:  Once calving starts, the early-rising ranchers I know start monitoring heifers and cows around the clock. Spring is the season of renewal, and no one understands that better than those who live close to the land, whose days are shaped by its cycles. As wobbly-legged calves emerge into pastures and fields, the lowing of their mothers joins the medley of an awakening land.

10. Riparian Air: It comes unexpectedly, those first hints of water against warm stone, twining through growing things, carried on a warm breeze. Can you smell the color green? It is the scent of spring.

Grief is like a stone dropped into a slow autumn river. First, its entry, the splash, the circular ripples reverberating out and out and on. Then, the repose. Water moves around it, yields to its edges, creates new eddies, turns it now and again. It rests amongst other rocks, shifts in texture and even shape with passing currents and years, becomes part of the stream itself, bits of sifted silt refracting sunlight, settling to bedrock.

Perhaps a meditation on past and present,
the grain of rounds leading to the stroke
that splits them clean. Is tracing the knots
and whorls like reading
a fortune of how they come
apart and how they cleave together?

Or perhaps a meditation on form
and function, the swing of the maul
both power and grace. You feel it,
rising and falling like your breath
in the cold, the slide of sinew and muscle
under your coat, the wood warming already your skin.

Or a meditation on enough and plenty,
on stocking and stoking the rack,
on tending a house until a sense of home
fills the air. The radiance of flame, different
than the blow of a furnace, releases all
the years of growth, like branches reaching skyward.

And how that means generations,
your father’s swing and motion now your own,
becoming our son’s as he carries
an armload inside and helps me lay the fire.
Which is all to say, a woodstove and its heat are simply
beauty in the end, and love.

I initially wrote this poem as a Father’s Day gift for my husband, Rob, and he later had a version of it tattooed on his leg along with an image of the log cabin in which he grew up. Todd O’Hare of Rolling Tattoo in Laramie did the ink. His work is fabulous (and I would know – he’s done about ten tattoos for Rob and one for me, so I get to enjoy his art every day.) Check him out here: https://www.rollingtattoo.com/todd-ohare.

Wishing you the merriest of holidays and many moments of joy, peace and love this season.

The darkened sky above and clouds along the eastern hills. The sun a silvering at that rim, the bellies of the clouds lit from beneath and the dark yet above. Then the dark giving way to the land, and the land blue and gray for one slow moment comprised only of heartbeats and breathes before a warming gold blooms down the fence posts and out across the plains.

On a dry autumn evening, the setting sun catches in the needles of a limber pine, sets the tree glimmering as if with raindrops from a summer shower. Each droplet shines, its own glowing globe. Sage and rabbit brush burnish golden, and granite glistens. The land whispers, wind over rock, through grass soft at the end of the day, and, as I listen, I hear it say that this study of light is a study of more, that it will darken with the falling sun, that it will catch itself tomorrow against new leaves, on the other side of pines, dancing with transposed shadows. That the light that shimmers in those delicate points in the tree before me never evaporates but instead turns and returns and touches into beauty many things, many places, in the course of one rotation of the earth.

Wyoming, August 2012

Join me here on the trail, and let’s rest, press our hands against our knees to ease the straps of our packs until they feel young and limber enough to continue stepping down and down to South Fork’s meadows. Here, where green grass and timberline break to the burn’s mean edge, where heat split stone to sharp slabs, where the earth baked to dust and ash powdered fine, where trees twist in blackened fingers that claw for blue sky, and where the thick smell of smoke lingers. But also, do you hear within the char the stream’s sweet chime, see the slender shoots that will grow and green with time? Our big tree, halfway down the ridge’s breakneck slope, clings with roots half-singed to earth gone black and reaches with living, rising limbs towards clouds. Those flowers springing from dark soot echo sparks, their petals red, orange, vibrant now, after fire gorged and fled along the ridge until, rim-rocked, it turned back, consumed its own licking tongue, left blessed trees untouched to seed the flame-tilled ground for saplings yet to come.  

I hold stories in the weft and weave of sturdy canvas threads. Stories from your grandfather and his step-father, from your father and mother, stories from your own lips. Also, from others, family by blood and shared experience. Stories you might tell your children if you could only tease them out, separate the details from the laden fabric of history and receding memory.

I hold also the fading stains of antelope blood, the scent of stew meat simmered long over propane stoves, the light of spring, summer, and fall suns, the dusky smoke and glow of campfires. I have stood in gale force winds, sudden rains, and heavy snows. When I grew weary and thin, an oiled tarp and new canvas stitched me strong again. New layers laid down atop the old, obscuring some of what was, metamorphosis a necessity of perpetuity.

What you have seen, so have I, the generations of Wyoming kin shaped by sage and sky. I know the hills of Old Carbon and Hanna and of the Red Desert. Raise me up still in that country, straighten the splintery ridgepole, string the guy wires taut, set me to catch the wind and hold to earth.

A twist of hair caught on a barb of wire, also a twist around the smooth barrel of the strand. Auburn shot through with white speaks of a roan hide. I pluck the coarse fibers free, feel with a fingertip the sharp point that snagged them, look out over ashen sage and a wash of bunchgrass to the rise of granite jagged ridges and the sweep of horizon climbing up the clouds to the sky above, squint beneath the bright sun and imagine but do not see the strong back, straight legs, and supple neck of the horse. My fingers work the tail hairs into a slim braid, perhaps with which to make a bracelet or necklace or a stampede strap but more likely just a magpie souvenir, like spent shell casings and wind smoothed stones, a thing without purpose but for its bright echoes. Probably this slender lock caught the wire whisking after a fly, but I like to imagine flight, the powerful action of hock and hoof across a broken land wide open for running. As I close the gate and walk back to the rumbling of my truck, I reflect on the new drift fence, the drift of time, that which shifts and that which does not in a place like this.

Every year in February, I start to get cabin fever and long to be outside. So, in honor of looking forward to getting outside and as a reminder that the seasons do indeed turn, here’s looking back to summer and fall!

I love to ride my horse, Scout, on dirt roads that form a square around the ranchlands surrounding the barn where I keep her. The barn owners jokingly call it “going around the block.” Scout and I watch the seasons turn each time we ride the loop.