Nicholas Nash Another Return of the Loons www.nashco.com

At the end of a long dreary stretch, I moved my computer down to a table in the guestroom, primarily because that room has more natural light and a view of the small lake on which I live.

As each gray and dreary day arrived, I even stopped looking out the window: I knew there was ice, it was gray at the end of winter, and there was no compelling reason to lift my head to look out.

One morning last week, I noticed that there was some open water just off the shore, and on my walk I noted a pair of geese observing the water from the road like two timid swimmers, afraid of the shock of the cold. I looked to the edge of the receding ice and saw ducks behaving just like the geese.

At last, signs of real Spring, not that awful Mother nature joke she’d played on us the previous week, she gave us a sweet Sunday full of sun and incipient warmth, followed immediately by six inches of snow just after dawn on Monday. People were beginning to talk to themselves, and I was one of them.

That afternoon, something made me raise my head and look out toward the lake. In a glance, winter ended, Spring began, and Summer could not be far behind.

Just off the shore was the very first loon of the season….a large bird, with its black and white stripes up the neck, flattish head, and long beak, serene in the narrow strip of open water. The loon can only be a loon – it is unique, can’t be confused with other water birds. At the sight, my heart leaped up.

Primitive, with a series of haunting, wailing calls, the sound of a loon seems to connect with the primitive parts of our brain. One cannot hear the call of a loon without feeling a frisson of excitement, of delight, of the ageless call of the wild. Once heard, the sounds of a loon are never forgotten.

In these northern climes, the calendar is often irrelevant, and that is why we discuss the weather endlessly and why the television meteorologists with their gizmos and gadgets and dopplers still seem to have a sixty percent chance of getting the forecast wrong, sixty miles either side of a line running between any two points in Minnesota.

So Spring began here - with a loon, swimming in silence.

More than enough, I believe.