By Mack Williams

It began one morning, as I saw something through my backyard glass doors out of that extra-sensitive corner of my eye.

In a distant wooded area, I saw strands of what looked like green plastic protruding from forgotten, un-raked, dead-brown leaves.

The appearance of bundled green strands reinforced my impression of some old remnant of a woven plastic lawn chair, the green plastic long ago parted from its supporting metal tubes.

A quick view through my binoculars revealed it to be the annual reappearance of daffodil stalks sprouted from their perennial, buried bulbs.

On a later afternoon walk in a park, I saw squirrels running through the trees, stopping intermittently on the ground to perhaps inspect fragments of acorns fallen from their nests during winter nibbling (like fallen pieces of popcorn when people nibble in movie theaters or on their couches at home).

The squirrels acted like stir-crazy cats.

I blew my nose (sign of spring’s airborneness) and noticed a tiny crack in the asphalt path where little weeds’ leaves were already displayed in that micro-canyon. They were the first weeds of the season (at least in that crack), neatly lined up one by one, not like summer’s profusion and confusion, when they become so prolific and indistinguishable from each other.

Thinking back to that first sighting of spring 2022’s green daffodil stalks, I don’t know why I was surprised to see them. It’s almost like I didn’t know spring would re-appear, as it has done so many times before. Why, it’s been a part of my personal experience at least back to March 1951, my birth on the eve of a spring long ago.

In the grass adjacent my path was a piece of trash, but not just any trash. It was a lost light switch cover, with switch; and of all things, the switch was in the on position!

I thought: “Surely, spring has been switched on again!”