The Threshold of Spring

The earth remembers warmth the way a closed hand opens— reluctant, then certain. Green whispers at the seam of snow, pressing through the boundary where winter still holds its breath.

I watch the buds swell with patience older than my bones, each one a small defiance against the fading cold, a promise written in the language of things that grow.

The birds return to tell us we have survived another dark. Their voices stitch the hours back together, weaving time from silence, making the waiting into something that means.

Here at the edge between seasons, I feel the weight shift, that ancient pressure releasing, and everything suddenly remembers how to become.