Perspectives on the Arrival of Spring

It has been nearly a week since the "official" onset of spring, but, in New York, the bitter cold temperatures would not indicate that we were having a spring at all.  Last year, on the first "official" day of spring, it was quite warm, and I wrote in a blog entry that "nothing was better at being the first harbinger of spring than the purple flowers poking out of the Chives plant which I have in my urban terrace garden", and I described how the Chive plant provided inspiration for a single-sided card that I designed. It can be viewed in the store-front pages of my web-site (where purchase information is also available). Today, as I reflect on this card and the chives that inspired it, I confess that agree with Chris who has "marked" it as an Easter or Passover card in those store-front pages, and I truly believe it might be a good selection (though very non-tradional) for an Easter or Passover card (both holidays are coming up next month) because, like those holidays, chives can be seen as a symbol of resurrection and renewal.
It is somewhat odd that I have come to this conclusion, at a time when resurrection and renewal do not seem close at hand given the long winter and the tumultuous state of the world; but history tells us that there will be a springtime, and springtime is a theme that I've used in my black and white photography (both in my collection of impressionistic note-cards and in my original prints like Springtime in the Greenhouse, which can be seen at the top of this post).

But signs of spring are not limited to first flowers, first buds, or nuances in a greenhouse; signs of spring are not even limited to temperatures; signs of spring often appear in subtle ways such as the arrival of spring as seen by E.B. White in an article he wrote fifty-eight years ago, March 27, 1953.


"SPRING ALWAYS USED TO ARRIVE in midtown in the window boxes of Helen Gould Shepard house. Something about the brightness and suddenness of that hyacinthine moment said Spring, something about its central location, too. The other day we passed the Gould House and shed a private tear for olden springtimes. Spring struggles into Manhattan by other routes these days; Rockefeller Center has pretty much taken the occasion over. Rockefeller's is different from Helen Gould's. Less homey. More like Christmas at Lord & Taylor's — beautiful but contrived. One never knows where one will encounter the first shiver and shine of spring in the city. Often it is not in a flowering plant at all, merely in a certain quality of light as it strikes the walls. We met ours quite a while back, late one afternoon in February, driving south through the Park; in an instant the light had lengthened and strengthened and bounced from the towers into our systems, hitting us as a dram of tonic reaching the stomach, and, lo, it was spring."


After reflecting on E. B. White's observations, what, I ask, dear reader, is to tell me, what's your first sign of the arrival of spring?