The fields lie open and patient—last season’s wheat stubble poking through the dissolving cover which shrinks in cool, deep shadows beneath fence lines and hollows. Skeletal trees reach against a sky the colour of old porcelain. Bare branches drip, and the snow itself seems to exhale as it collapses inward, granular and spent. In the stillness, the faint, tentative calls of early birds drift on the breeze signalling that its coming… Spring does not arrive in thunder; it seeps in, slow and faithful, one melting patch at a time. The land knows. And waits.