The crocuses have been blooming in Columbia over the past week, a bit ahead of schedule due to our mild winter. Their appearance, together with that of other early bloomers, such as snowdrops, periwinkle and hyacinths, is always a welcome sight, indicating that the depth of winter has surely passed.
Nevertheless, these precocious flowers signal the onset of an annual period during which the weather is especially challenging across the American Heartland. Here in Missouri, we enter the gray, damp, raw days of late winter and early spring, characterized by wet snow, cold rain and a muddy landscape. And out west, at our Littleton, Colorado, farm, we face the heaviest snowfalls of the year as the upslope storms of March and April descend on the Front Range.
Like the arrival of snow geese and the frenzied calls of chorus frogs, these crocus days are bittersweet, an early sign of spring but a reminder that the sunny, mild, heart of the season is still a month or more away. Until then, we impatient humans will rely on the spectacle of waterfowl migrations, the greening of our landscape and the growing intensity of birdsong to balance the gloomy days and sloppy terrain.
