We were accustomed to hearing the high sweet trill of white-throat sparrows in the summer afternoons when we descended mountains in the White Forest of New Hampshire, where we annually trekked with our then-young family of three teens. Now, a small flock of white-throats recently visited our bird feeders, and when they departed after a week or so of daily pickings, a pair remained behind, and visit us daily still. When I was out early this morning in the backyard with our two little dogs one of them was trilling nearby. Their song is equally as delightful as that of the cardinals who are also frequent visitors.

The weather remains slow to warm up in our area. Although there was ample sun yesterday there won't be much today. On the other hand, it is beginning to warm nicely. We've enjoyed seeing tiny anemones in the garden for the past week or so, and can see peonies, bleeding hearts, lilies and irises, roses and columbine hailing us with new spring life.

In the ravine, the monotones of grey, green and brown persist. The forest floor's litter of generations of dried foliage is steadily transitioning to the humus that nurses the ferns and other bracken, in fact all manner of botanical specimens to resurface and have their days of successive glory in the woods. Yesterday we saw the first of the woodland violets in bloom, a tiny yellow flower hardly noticeable. And the Mourning Cloaks are fluttering about in their pairs-dancing mating ritual.

New foliage is asserting itself on the various shrubs in the ravine, some of them bright red/green and hugely attractive to the eye, destined to lose their red hue and become ordinary green to blend in with all the other shades of green on the cusp of breaking out. Blackberry canes are beginning to sprout new life, and there are appearances on the forest floor of wild strawberries.

No hint yet that the wild apple trees are preparing their foliage and their early blooms, and nor are the hawthorns yet showing signs of life; first to lose their foliage in the fall, and last to regain them in the spring; what a distinction.

Life is renewing itself, as it should.