Happy New Year

For me (and, I suspect, for plenty of others, past and present) the real New Year’s Day comes with the first good, soaking rain of the year—our own Moveable Feast.  Can there be any more sudden or thorough transformation short of that first magical whitewashing in snow country?  All our other seasonal changes, such as they are, are so gradual as to be practically imperceptible.

Out of the endless gray doldrums of a west coast summer, overnight all of life seems to regreen with the grass, a million dim and faltering little pilot lights suddenly pop into flame again.  All the wild is washed clean from top to toe, leaf to root, refreshed like a desert traveler dying of thirst and exhaustion who is fully revived after one good drink from the well.

The birds feel it too: they seem to materialize out of nowhere, repopulating the dead land, animating every twig and fencepost.  Jays of both species disport in gangs, even flickers appear in numbers.  Little flocks of juncoes and quail and golden-crowned sparrows glean seeds and new-sprouting grains, kinglets and chickadees rummage among the trees, dainty elegant hermit thrushes haunt the twiggy hillside, and the resident black phoebe flies acrobatic curlicues, lanching off the fenceposts.

All is clean, new, fresh, promising.  When the sun comes out everything sparkles.  The air feels soft and bracing at the same time—it even smells great.

I was especially impressed with the meadow; it went from dead brown to fresh green practically overnight.  The change is not nearly so dramatic in the unmowed, ungraced grasslands elsewhere in the neighborhood, whose masses of dead thatch conceal the new greenery pushing its way up from below.  But at least in the woods the transformation is clean and clear.  Every dormant moss and lichen and fern is instantly green again and vibrant with life.  These respond to the rain even faster than the grass.  Resurrection!  

Happy New Year to you and yours.