Mud

“Mud in March means a hay crop in June,” wrote my friend, Garnet Perman. Her essay, Evolution of a Ranch Wife, is printed in the anthology, Leaning into the Wind.

We haven’t had a muddy March in a few years. For several springs, we’ve seen a lot more dust blowing than snow blowing. Even this year, we didn’t have much mud in March. But April 3 brought a heavy, wet snow, the sort that I remember coming around the spring equinox in my childhood years. Not a blizzard, just a foot or so of snow that settled down across the prairie.

Most of us in the northern plains quickly weary of winter. We are ready for the sunshine to warm the earth, ready for the birds to return, ready for spring. This year, the birds came early. Robins. Meadowlarks. Blackbirds. Killdeer. Even the mourning doves arrived well before the end of March.

What does it mean? What do the birds know that we do not? What can we learn from watching in awe as the seasons shift, blending, overlapping, sometimes going “back” but always changing.

With an early spring following an open and unseasonably warm winter, it almost felt like we hadn’t had enough winter. Which is not something any reasonable Dakotan should admit aloud. But I know I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Someone once told me that if we have a brown Christmas, we’ll have a white Easter, and that is in fact what happened here this year. We did not plant potatoes on Good Friday. We watched snow pile up deeper than it has in a while. And watched it keep falling and keep getting deeper.

Easter sunrise dawned on a white world, the hills sparkling with snow, although some brown patches were already showing from the melting that began as soon as the storm ended. By afternoon, the brown patches had overtaken the white, and only the deepest drifts remained, slowly sinking and soaking into the earth.

And now we have mud.

They say that the meadowlarks will be snowed on three times after they come, so we may be in for another spring storm. But there are signs everywhere that spring really is here. The sun is warming the earth. Geese and cranes are flying north. Orion walks in the west. The buds on the elm trees are swelling. Inexorably, the growth and the warmth and the light will bring the grass, thanks to the mud.

My kitchen floor needs scrubbing. A spring storm always makes calving and lambing more difficult. But, as my neighbor often says, “this country doesn’t need much moisture, it just needs it at the right time.” And we are all so grateful for this snow and this mud. Drought conditions range from serious to severe not far from us. We are all at the mercy of the weather patterns. And those of us who call these Great Plains home know what a gift a muddy spring can be.