SCAVENGING

Premature as last week’s heat wave was, it was enough for now.

Text and photography by Susan Forker

The winter can be long and tedious. Unless everything is covered with a fresh blanket of snow, which is generally spectacular, the leafless trees and the crackled and brownish land casts an overall dullness over everything, including our moods. Never is that feeling more acute than during these waning days of March—especially when there’s a nor’easter in the forecast.

I enjoy the change of seasons, but like most around here, I go into a mental hibernation until I see that first glimmer of spring. Amid the lovely, unseasonable warmth last week, there it was. Speckled among the dead grass were patches of bright green, spotted with the lone crocus. A purple hellebore peeked out from petrified leaves. The branches of forsythia held buds that promised of yellow blooms to come. And hundreds of straight and tall daffodil stems were suddenly ubiquitous, with the occasional bulb barely able to contain itself.

Those first warm breezes and the surprise sighting of snowdrops clustered in the woods never fail to stir something in me—hope, excitement, impatience—even after a (mostly) mild winter.

Susan Forker is the owner and designer of the Doylestown-based joeyfivecents, a line of one-of-a-kind jewelry and accessories.