It got above 50°F yesterday! And the sun shone in blue skies most of the afternoon. I opened a window… well… I cracked it open a sliver… for a couple hours… on the lee side of the house out of the wind… But still! No resultant frostbite. The furnace didn’t even kick on… The snow piles are much reduced, only true piles along roads and paths at this point. I can see soil and plants and my garden beds, mushy green and brown in place of ice white. I can’t stress enough how much of a relief this is. The melting of the snow lifted a burden I wasn’t entirely aware I was bearing. (Of course, there have been other burdens…)
The rapid melt did cause some issues. The Mad River, a tributary of the Winooski that flows out of the mountains in a confined ravine as sharp as an ax-blade, overflowed its banks, cresting two feet above flood stage in the middle of the day. Floodwaters did not stop flowing until late at night. Montpelier was nervous as the Winooski River, still clogged with ice, rose with the influx from the Mad River. But it did not reach dangerous levels. There were no other floods in my neck of the woods, but paved roads throughout my county turned into Swiss cheese as ice heaves collapsed. And the mud is just alarming… But, judging by the number of people out and about just in my neighborhood, I think people are generally welcoming the thaw.
I was also pleased to welcome many new chile pepper sprouts this weekend. Most of the pots have plants now. I was not counting on such high germination rates, so I’m not sure I have space for all these plants. But maybe I’ll shuffle other things out of the plan. Or plant peppers in the strawberry bed. I’m certainly not going to toss potential chiles! It’s hard enough thinning each pot to just one plant. (I usually plant 2-3 seeds per pot.)
So I was feeling quite vernal yesterday. With the equinox next week, I decided it was time to work some spring color magic. I changed my bedding from the adobe-hued velvet coverlet of winter to a pale yellow floral quilt, and I put away all the white candles of Imbolg, bringing out taupe and blue and yellow. I also changed the pillow covers on the window seat (the insulation décor) from white and fuzzy to mostly green and floral.
But I balked at getting out any other florals. Nor did I dig into the bookstore decoration bins. No rabbits or eggs yet. It is not time for that here, no matter that the equinox is next week. There are no flowers. There are no shoots even. No signs yet of the early spring bulbs like crocus and snowdrops and chionodoxa. The trees are hardly budding, never mind producing blossoms or catkins. Evergreen perennials like lavender and hellebore are only slowly starting to rebound after being squashed flat for months. And there will be no showy spring flowers like tulips or iris for weeks. This is not a time of flowers.
Similarly, it is too early to spread rabbits around your house, inviting the fecundity of the lagomorphs into your life. Though, to be honest, I don’t know that I want to encourage nature with rabbits. What if that’s taken literally? I already have squirrels and groundhogs…
Yesterday, my inbox had a few newsletters from various pagan-adjacent groups. It was all decidedly pink, with images of lambs and bunnies, butterflies and nesting birds, and daffodils nodding under blooming fruit trees. Altars were decked with rose petals and chaplets of violets. And… well… none of this is associated with spring. In fact, these things do not happen at the same time, even when they do happen. Butterflies are a rare sight when birds are sitting on their eggs. Violets and roses hardly ever bloom at the same time. And you don’t want fruit trees to blossom with the daffodils because you’ll likely lose your harvest to a late frost.
For some reason, all this disconnected imagery really irked me this year.
I guess since learning that Samhain is not a remnant new year or a day of the dead festival, but rather a literal ending of summer with a Roman day of ancestor veneration (formerly a May holiday) grafted onto the Celtic festival, I’ve been a little touchy about the imagery and meaning of these holidays we invented in the mid-20th century. These are ostensibly celebrations of the wheel of the year, supposedly grounded in time and place so that we can feel connection to our land. But we haven’t been good at adapting them. Instead, the imagery ossified into whatever was popular in post-War England. And it wasn’t even true to reality there. It’s the back-to-the-land, sometimes neo-Victorian gothic, sometimes pseudo-Celtic aesthetic that captured the hearts of disaffected suburbanites in the 1950s and 1960s. This means that the things we center our celebrations around don’t actually have a good foundation in reality anywhere.
When the calendar was exported elsewhere, some attempts were made to modify the rituals. The Aussies and other Southern folks quickly figured out that the wheel needed to be flipped to fit their time. But that has still not completely taken root. Instead, they seem to follow the annual astrological cycle, celebrating the time of Aries in March and so on — though this doesn’t work well either, given that the constellations were named by Mediterranean peoples and reflect their seasonal preoccupations when those stars are visible north of the equator. In California, a land that shares few similarities with England (or, indeed, with the rest of North America), the Reclaiming folks dropped most of the land-based imagery and chose to stress New Age crystals, faeries, and such like. Which is fun, but sort of heavy in costumery and light on reality.
(The younger folks are changing that now, supported by Starhawk and others from the more composty end of the spectrum. But still, Californian public rituals tend to focus more on feminism and social justice rather than rooting into the land.)
I understand the metaphors behind the Rabbit, the Seed and the Egg. I understand that we are working sympathetic magic to prepare ourselves for Spring. But the time of the equinox — what the Wiccans named Ostara and what I now call the Opening (from the folk etymologies of Ester, “dawn” or “east”, and April) — is just not spring. It is Spring, a time of jagged beginnings and raw change. There is no fluff. No pink. No flowers. Very little evidence of the stirring in sap and soil at all. Spring is a hope more than an actual state. All those bunnies and eggs are anticipating summer, the season of growth, not the season of germination and birth and sap. (None of which are especially pretty…)
Nor can I say that my cultural traditions were especially pink and fluffy. My ancestors and my distant cousins still living in my ancestral lands didn’t and don’t do much with eggs or bunnies. Except eat them. Nor with this time of year, to be honest. The plow was anointed in early January. Live stock were honored at Imbolg. Seed stock might have been blessed some time during Lent, probably closer to the equinox than Candlemas. There are the ubiquitous ball games and pancakes. But not much else happened until May Day.
However, there is a cultural tradition that happens this time of year. On the actual equinox in my part of the world, in fact. That’s St Patrick’s Day. My mom’s parents were from Ireland. My dad’s ancestry is a bit more muddled, but there are strains of Scots and Britons. My sister did a mouth swab genetic test and it came up with huge blobs over Ireland and the UK and only small blots elsewhere on the map (though those smatterings are really ALL OVER THE MAP…). So, I consider myself Irish. And the Irish celebrate St Paddy’s Day at the vernal equinox.
For me celebrating a cultural holiday at the equinox feels right, not least because there is something tangible to focus the celebration on. The equinox itself is a brief moment in the sun’s apparent path across the sky. The spring weather that follows the sun is fickle and almost as brief, a few bright afternoons mixed into snow and mud and frost and melt. You can’t trust spring to be here on the equinox. And some years we don’t see spring at all. Instead, we get a bewilderingly abrupt jolt from frozen winter to boiling summer. But St Paddy’s Day happens on March 17th every year. That we can hold on to. That we can count on. That we can celebrate.
There is even a sort of parallel on the autumnal side of the growing season. Autumn may be painting the maples in August or it may not bring falling leaves until the week before the first snowfall in October. The harvest season begins in June and July, depending on the tardiness of spring, but around here it doesn’t end until the apples, pumpkins and winter squash are gathered in around Halloween. In fact, there are few times without some sort of harvest in Vermont. By design… we are a localizing food-web, after all… From maple syrup in March to Brussel’s sprouts and roots and kale in November, there is usually some harvest to celebrate. But Harvest Home? That is more a cultural holiday than an agricultural holiday, no matter the name. It is celebrating the in-gathering of the tribe and a successful provisioning for winter. And it is more properly celebrated on the old holiday of Michaelmas, which, like St Paddy’s Day, is a better marker of the actual day of equal light and darkness than the equinox.
So anyway…
Instead of flowers, I have shamrocks. And these can just be images, because that’s what is important, not the actual plant. (Though I do have a couple of those…) Instead of the Rabbit and Egg, I have solar crosses, spirals and Celtic knots. Instead of pink, there is green. And I welcome the season of growth with soda bread and colcannon, though there are pancakes and sugar on snow also — because that’s how people of my Vermont tribe fete this time of year.
I also listen to a lot of pipes and fiddles… really, this happens all year, but it’s nearly non-stop from St Brigid’s Day to Easter. What Christmas music is to December in most households, Celtic music is to my March.
So, as I was tromping up and down the stairs, I was dancing to The Afro-Celtic Sound System and The Chieftains. While I was reading my Sunday morning books, I listened to Anúna and Clannad. And I fixed dinner to Bing Crosby (because it’s dorky and I love it…).
But then it got dark. And cold. Had to shut the window long before the sun went down. And the furnace kicked on as I was sitting down to eat in my now vernal home.
Just a reminder that it’s not spring…
But it is Spring… And St Paddy will bring the equinox next week.
(By the end of the day, the relentless cheer had started to feel a little discordant against the backdrop of our current moment… so I went to bed with Skyrim… which is sort of the soundtrack of 2026…)
©Elizabeth Anker 2026
By My Solitary Hearth 