Early March Music

It's the sound of snow melting off the roof, glossy icicles plummeting from their lofty perches into the deep snow under the windows of the little blue house in the village. It's the impetuous voices of creeks, streams and rivers crying freedom from beneath their icy rural coverlets, the gurgle of urban tides running headlong through muddy leaf-choked gutters in the village.

It's the gentle hoot of the nesting Great Horned Owls in their oak tree on the hill, and the blithe notes of a male Northern Cardinal singing in the hawthorn tree in the garden.

Music, all of it, and when everything freezes over in a day or two and snow begins to fall again, that will be music too.