"Robins and some of the hardier birds appear early, when snow is still on the ground but brown earth and last year's withered grass is beginning to show in patches. The gurgling, tinkling sounds of water from melting snow and ice can be heard as the clucking of a robin and his first song uplifts the spirit. But the these sounds are merely harbingers of a spring that is still far away. Winter will lash back again out of the north, bringing snow and freezing weather. And the birds will sit with feathers fluffed up to endure the cold, disconsolate and waiting for a change, wondering, perhaps, what had happened to spring and why they had come so soon. But spring will advance nonetheless, silently and unnoticed. These rearguard actions of winter will be repulsed in the end; the higher sun will assert its dominance through the longer days, and the winds will dry the fallow land wherein a million shoots from the seeds of last year's growth are slowly stirring."-Eliot Porter, "Summer Island."
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