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Seasons come to our bodies much like they do to trees and mountains, lakes and bays. Each individually has its own rhythm and signs of changing, adapting, and flowing from one season to the next, until the momentum of so many heralds the new season en masse.<\/p>\n
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Beckoned by the brilliant sunshine, predictions of temperatures in the high 40s, and the lengthening daylight, I went walking over the weekend at the Ashokan Reservoir<\/a> to look for signs of spring, and I ran smack-dab into winter. Each of us has places where we go to seek out the seasons, and the Ashokan Reservoir is one of mine. The reservoir, in Ulster County, is a magnificent place unto itself, 13 square miles ringed by forested shoreline and a backdrop of beautiful Catskill Mountain peaks. (This is not to discount its controversial history, since New York City acquired the area and displaced a large number of communities in the early 20th<\/sup> century in order to create the reservoir as one of its sources for drinking water.)<\/p>\n \n The reservoir\u2019s two long walkways, one an actual promenade and the other a closed road the public now uses, provide a panorama of each season, from the appearance of the water to the plants and grasses along the slopes to the palette of the trees and the soft, rounded mountain ridges. Because the walkways are elevated, one feels at times as if you can almost touch the huge open sky or become bedazzled by the cloud show rolling in front of you and above.<\/p>\n \n Punxsutawney<\/span><\/strong> Who?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \n It\u2019s about this time every year that I start to feel spring will be here soon, no matter what Punxsutawney Phil<\/a> says. Each person has her or his own sense of the early hints that spring is on its way. \u201cThe snowdrops<\/a> will pop up Feb. 14 or so,\u201d said a friend and colleague recently. I eagerly track the lengthening daylight, for one. On Feb. 8, New York City saw an hour and 15 minutes more daylight than on Dec. 21, the Winter Solstice. I also feel it in any spate of sunny days we get in late January and February. A meteorologist may not agree with this, but as I say, seasons come to our bodies individually.<\/p>\n \n Of spring\u2019s arrival, naturalist Hal Borland<\/a> wrote, \u201cthe vernal equinox doesn’t occur til the end of this week, but I saw and felt and smelled winter preparing to call it quits yesterday, around four o’clock in the afternoon. That doesn’t mean no more snow or ice or sleet. All it means is change, which is slow and often interrupted.\u201d<\/p>\n As someone who loves both winter and spring, I often feel around this time of year that I have a foot standing in both seasons. The winter person wants to still ice skate while the spring person is eager to walk or bike in a favorite spring jacket. The trick \u2013 and the lesson the Ashokan Reservoir often teaches me, is: Be in the season of this day, of this present moment.<\/p>\n \n Driving up to the reservoir from New Paltz on a brightly sunny, getting-warmer Sunday afternoon, I expected to see and smell some of the earliest signs of the coming season. But the Ashokan Reservoir on this day was squarely in winter. In fact, it felt more firmly planted in winter than the weather just a couple of miles away. The first sign was how stiff and bracing the winds felt along the water, with the wheat-beige stalks shivering and shimmering on the slopes down to it.<\/p>\n \n The view confirmed this sense. Dense ice and snow covered almost the entire reservoir, in different patterns. <\/span>Along the shoreline, the trunks and branches of the leafless white birches punctuated the dark evergreens. A thick cover of snow made the curves of the distant mountains look even softer under the diffuse yellow light of the later afternoon.<\/p>\n \n In this frozen world, the eye naturally seeks out color and light. Much of the ice contained beautiful pale turquoise and silver crystal-like swirls. Long slivers of sunlight, cast between the tree shadows, danced in turns on the snow like natural spotlights. A bank of yellow-green cedars along one wall of trees was showy among the dark green and brown. A golden-yellow light bathed the small cumulus clouds in the western sky, almost too shiny to look at directly.<\/p>\n We stayed a short while longer, as the first deep shadows came to the coves and the hollows with the sun on its late-afternoon arc downward. Soon it would set over High Point Mountain. The air was cold, clear, tingly, and exhilarating. It felt nowhere near those high 40s I had seen on the weather forecast monitors, though it probably actually hit that mark on the thermometer. A couple-dozen people were on the roadway, walking with quickness in their steps and taking in the beauty.<\/p>\n \n Following Seasonal Change<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Though loving winter as I do, I\u2019ll still be among those watching for the signs of spring. At the beginning of his book North With the Spring<\/em>, naturalist Edwin Way Teale<\/a> wrote that \u201cspring advances up the United States at the average rate of about 15 miles a day.\u201d I have always loved that concept, being able to almost picture the travel of spring in North America, but knowing it\u2019s neither linear nor cut-and-dry as humans heading up I-95. In the late 1940s, Teale and his wife Nellie took a 17,000-mile journey, up the Eastern Seaboard, to describe in detail the arrival of spring.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n You can get a great sense of this progression by checking out the Journey North<\/a>, in which K-12 students share their field observations of migrating birds and mammals and other seasonal changes with students and teachers across North America. Folks surely will record their observations of signs the new season is around the corner for the Hudson River Almanac<\/a>, which engages those along the Hudson River from New York City northward to its source in the Adirondacks.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n On this day, the Ashokan Reservoir delivered a wintry punch when some were eager for signs of spring, greeting us on its own terms, as always, and reminding me not to get so far ahead of myself that I miss the gifts of today.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Note: Do you have a favorite sign of spring or experience of winter? What is your favorite place(s) to experience the seasons? Share it in with Mindful Walker in a comment below<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Seasons come to our bodies much like they do to trees and mountains, lakes and bays. Each individually has its own rhythm and signs of changing, adapting, and flowing from one season to the next, until the momentum of so many heralds the new season en masse. Beckoned by the brilliant sunshine, predictions of temperatures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[39,32,15],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beyond-gotham","tag-catskills","tag-hudson-valley","tag-nature"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2PDqY-n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}