Spring rhythm.

SPRING begins with flowers. That is what Swinburne wrote. "And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, / And in green underwood and cover / Blossom by blossom the spring begins." Pre-spring begins with sound.

The essential, coldest, and most threatening mark of winter is silence. Urban bustle masks it, but at night in the country it is revealed. No leaves stir; they have fallen. No streams gargle; they have frozen. No insects creak; they have died. If wind blows, it moves the tree branches with the crazed power of a force in interstellar space. You might hear a limb crack. A far-off dog is as alone and exposed as your thoughts.

The first sound to break the spell is dripping. By day, temperatures flirt with the freezing point, running above it, then coyly falling back. Even when the thermometer reports little movement, the sun is higher and stronger, and creates small Daytonas and Ft. Lauderdales on the roof. The snow piled there, like shingles dully left by the roofers of February, begins to sink. It shows a brave white face to its destroyer, but it is dissolving within. The gutters, which can handle any downpour, can't handle this. When the melt refreezes at night, they fill with rods of ice. So the water escapes over the sides, through joints, wherever there is a gap or an irregularity. In the snow beneath the corners, it drills little spa pools, miniature cold tubs. It baptizes the front step. It finds the space between your hat and your collar when you are fumbling with a key, or fetching firewood. What kind of a sample would it make? It is not funky enough for hip-hop, too slow for disco. It is a snare-drum tap for a color guard, or for a stripper from the days before health clubs taught pole dancing.

Water is moving in the trees too, and you can hear it if you tap them. Syrup can be made from hickories and birches, but the best purveyors are sugar maples. Half a dozen large ones stand in a small field by my lawn. They are not giants, they will never grace a record book, but they are big enough that birds who perch in them look impertinent and comical. They have the disheveled appearance of old ones, whether trees or people. The previous owner of my house made the field by clearing out the small stuff; the sugar maples remain, as if not wanting to go to their rooms just yet. Every year this time our friend brings over his drill and we tap a couple. Sometimes you can see dark stains where the sap is simply bursting out at the seams. The sound of water dripping off the eaves is interesting; the sound of sap dripping into buckets is thrilling. This is intimacy, for sap is like blood. Yet the sugar maples have enough to spare. They are so tall and the hydraulics of sucking sap up to their topmost branches seems so daunting, you ...