Central Vermont has entered the light half of the year. Yesterday was the true equinox in my part of the world. That is, it was the first day of more than twelve hours of daylight. Friday brings the vernal equinox, the Opening season, at 10:46am. The Hunger Moon goes dark today at 9:23pm, meaning tomorrow is the new Sap Moon. We are in the last two weeks of Lent. And on Monday I saw the first snowdrop in my garden. I think I’m ready to call it spring.
Except for the weather…
This week, we’ve had mud, rain, sleet, snow, and sustained 25mph winds with gusts up to 40mph. Due to the wind, much of the state of Vermont lost power early Tuesday morning, with several thousand customers in the eastern half of the state still powerless last night, from Brattleboro all the way to the Northeast Kingdom. The temperature rose to about 35°F on Monday and had dropped to 8°F late last night. So it doesn’t feel especially vernal… at least not compared to our ideas of spring…
But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s our ideas that are unseasoned.
Humans celebrate the vernal equinox with stories of eggs and rabbits and flowers in profusion. None of these things are in evidence in my part of the world around the equinox, probably not in most of the temperate sliver of this planet that has an actual season of spring. Though the equinox is when day and night are of equal length, in the temperate regions, these are days of rapid change. Light and dark do not stay balanced for long. This is the season of imbalance, of change and volatility, of teetering between ice and muddy melt. Winter is ending, but there isn’t yet enough steady summer to breed new life. I have exactly one flower in my garden. The daffodils are nubs barely poking above the wet soil. And eggs? I think the cardinals might be nesting, but I would not bet on the success of that brood. None of the other females are missing from the seed feeders, so it’s unlikely any other birds are nesting right now. Which, given 8°F, seems to be a wise choice.
Rabbits might be breeding now. Because rabbits… But they aren’t hopping about in the spring grass, eating the clover. Because there isn’t spring grass yet. When you do see rabbits in your garden at this time of year, they’re likely stripping the bark off your young fruit trees… But there isn’t much green life before the equinox. It is too cold, and there are too few hours of sunlight to fuel growing plant bodies. There are also few plant partners abroad in this weather. Insects are still dormant or distant. Same for most pollinating birds. There is always activity in the soil, but it is sluggish when the ground is frozen. Roots and their associated mycelia can’t access nutrients if all the pore spaces are filled with ice. Many microbes simply die in winter and they won’t begin to regenerate until the soil is reliably frost free.
Profuse flowers are still weeks away — because all the reasons to make a flower are still weeks away.
Yes, the Egg is a metaphor for life in gestation, for potential, for the coming of growth, but the symbolism falls flat when there are no actual eggs, when having an abundance of real eggs would result in death and not life. Most migrating birds have not even completed their arduous journey; they’re not setting up housekeeping yet in my part of the world. Domestic fowl are only now starting to lay. So this is not a time of eggs, and I feel that the Egg becomes incongruously meaningless in the context of actual Vermont spring.
I would put all these symbols of the beginning of summer on May Day, the actual beginning of summer. By then, there are flowers. The birds are definitely nesting. And the rabbits… are being rabbits… But this equinoctial time of year? This is the time of endurance mostly. Rapid swings from mud to single digit temperatures. Wind and rain and snow all in the same day.
Snow is not unusual spring weather in Vermont. In fact, when it comes down to it, there isn’t much usual in spring. Spring is chaos by definition. The sun is heating up the air, but the soil is still frozen. When the sun is gone, the air quickly chills off again. This continual temperature flux sends air pressure bobbing up and down like a MAGA sycophant’s head, creating wind (also similar…). And cooling air sheds the moisture it sucked up when the sun was warming things, which makes for icy rain and snow. Plus the days are growing longer. More energy is being pushed into the atmosphere every day. So there is more capacity for extremely energetic weather — with sudden bursts of lovely blue skies and birdsong in between the storms. So “spring weather” is not one thing; it’s everything.
Nor is spring a fixed time period, because all this chaos does not happen at a fixed pace. Yes, the length of days at a given latitude is uniform each year, but all the other factors that go into making the season are variable. And, of course, weather is the classic example of an emergent and chaotic system that is highly sensitive to initial states. Change a variable just a hair — a butterfly’s wing beat — and the resulting change in flow can be enormous — a blizzard in March. (Or a Blizzard…) So when and how this flow changes is not set in time.
Spring does not begin on a given day, nor does it end until day length stabilizes as the Earth moves closer to the solstice and all the changing variables settle down into a few weeks of calm predictability. This settling can take days, weeks, or even months. Change is… well, changeable. All the different things that feed into spring’s changes have to run their specific courses each year, and very little is the same one year to the next. The season just refuses to be hung on the calendar.
I think of Spring not as weather or time, but as the process of awakening in the green world. In my experience, waking up is an unpredictable phenomenon. Sleep may end at the same time every day, but what happens in between full sleep and full wakefulness is substantially variable. Sometimes I am instantly up and able to think and tie my shoes at the same time; sometimes I lie there for quite a long time of fog, trying to determine if I am, in fact, awake or not. I imagine it’s the same for trees and perennial plants. Any number of small things might drag out the process or speed it up.
This year seems to be a slow one. There are buds on the maples, and I have heard birds singing now and again. But mostly it’s still winter. In contrast to the mud in my driveway, the raised beds in my garden are still frozen solid, and the drainpipe is the garage is still clogged shut, creating a pond of slush where my car usually should be parked. (It’s parked out in the mud instead… because electricity and water seems unhealthful… )
However, this season of flux does reliably produce one sweet promise of the coming season of growth — maple sap! And tomorrow is the new Sap Moon. For my part of the world, there is no better symbol of this time of year than flowing sap and the profligate sugar that Mother Maple shares with all of us.
The thing about sap is that it starts flowing well before there is any outward sign of life. If you tap into the flow after the buds begin to open, you’re too late. By then, the sap is unpalatably bitter. So sap is a hidden process of enlivening, much like the occluded egg. This flow is also dependent upon the fluctuating temperatures of actual spring, needing a freeze each night followed by a thaw in the daylight hours to pump the sap from root to twig. Sap has actually tapped into the unbalanced flux of spring weather and transformed the chaos into strength. Sap needs spring. Sap is grounded in spring. Every luscious pint of syrup comes from this time of mud and ice and hidden stirring. The Opening season. The Sap Moon.
So, I’ve left the eggs and rabbits in the bins for now, figuratively and literally… That all will come later. For now, it is time to celebrate Maple here in Vermont.
What time is it for you? Do you have flowers already? Are the birds nesting or still mating? Or are they starting to leave your warm equatorial climes for northern breeding grounds? Do you have snow? Or mud? Or are you enjoying a mild reprieve from drought? And in the Southern hemisphere, are deciduous trees shedding their leaves? How is the harvest going? Is it finally starting to cool down?
The Sap Moon doesn’t work in most places. Most places don’t have maple trees. Many places hardly have spring. The trick to celebrating the seasons, to live grounded in time and place, is to first determine what your season brings. What does the equinox bring to your part of the world? What should your moon be named? What are the symbols of this time in your place?
You’re not going to find your seasons in printed words and images. Your seasons make up the place where you live. So take this Dark Moon Day to reflect on the lunation that begins tomorrow in your place. What do you name it? Think, also, of the season of flux around this equinox. What is that season to you? Name it and write that down. Maybe write it in a calendar. You won’t be surprised to learn that I keep copious notes in a physical date-book that I can easily read through as a reference. It is a critical tool, along with my weather journal, for keeping track of time in my place. And keeping track of time in your place is a critical skill in adapting yourself to place and thereby reducing your footprint on the world.
Because that’s what all this calendrical blather comes down to… learning how to be local… and enjoying that life! Yes, even spring as it actually is…
The Wednesday Word
for 18 March 2026
equinoctial
What does equinoctial mean to you? Think about it. If you’d like, send me a quick poem or story… or just a few thoughts. If you really have something to say, maybe enter my Wednesday Word contest on AllPoetry
To think on…
Today the Hunger Moon goes dark. Tomorrow begins the Sap Moon. These dark moon days always remind me that we must take a time to consider, to process, to think before doing. So today’s theme is “pause before action”.
©Elizabeth Anker 2026
By My Solitary Hearth 