BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… COLD SPRING DAYS. Cold spring days are special things. Too soon the air will be hot and ragged as summertime seems to arrive earlier each year and so I remain thankful for the chill of early spring. There is subtle beauty in the overcast, the clouds changing, gray and severe, the hanging-on of winter even as weeping willows come to life in greens and yellows and redbuds blossom in inexpressible purple crimson.

Spring is time for tilling of earth even as change is on the wind. I recall helping my mom plant onions in the evening hours, hands digging in two long strips of soil down by the barn and near the cedar trees. Beyond the hundred-year-old barbed wire fence row and deep in the sassafras woods, the woodcocks called their strange, buzzing mating dances, magical in the dusk. It was still too early for fireflies.

I lean back in my afternoon armchair, staring at a new print on the wall — Grant Wood’s “Spring in Town.” I found the art in one of the flea markets in Ozark and the dang thing wouldn’t get out of my head so I went and bought it three days later. Only after did I learn Wood finished the piece in 1941, mere months before my mom was born, only after was I reminded Wood was the quintessential Iowa artist of the 20th century, appropriate mix of humble farm boy and snobby ex-pat living in Paris. The art is mesmerizing for, in some strange way, his garden’s loamy earth and line of new spring iris are reflected in the same chilly springtime sunshine my grandparents knew. The folding of time is a strange thing, as is time itself. And cold spring days are all about change.

The sun will set. The winds again change. In the blink of an eye, the magic of the season again repeats. White oaks — poetically named Quercus alba in the Latin lexicon — will replace bare limb with white-yellow duck fluff, then with pea green leaves the size of a squirrel’s ear. The dance is all but eternal. There’s another springtime of my childhood, one with yellow lace curtains, a little plastic Dutch windmill in blue and cream — a promotional piece my mom saved from somewhere I know not — and homemade pancakes of a Saturday noon. Even the most mundane is magic if only because such is so very fleeting.

Singing in church, the tears come quietly. Tears for lost springtimes, lost moments, lost chances. Things that should have been said, things that should have been done, if only because we believe such things in life will last forever — until they are gone. Easter is already on its way, with songs of resurrection and hope although my long-gone moments are more of chocolate and bunnies and chocolate bunnies. Easter is a strange time of hope and loss, even in the newness of the season, perhaps because of the newness of the season.

Ostara, or Eostre, the old Anglo-Saxons called it and the new pagans have taken up the name, the old inexpressibility in the year’s turn, in rebirth, hope, the fertile earth and perhaps the occasional wandering fairy. Ozark and Appalachian cultures owe much to the Anglo-Saxons, that hardy people who conquered Britain and built kingdoms to hold off the Vikings long before the coming Normans and ultimate empire.

So many generations gone in the proverbial blink of an eye, mere seconds compared to the age of the earth, the age of the cosmos. And yet, here we are, mired in our own self-importance, longing always for something else, something more. Each new, old, cold spring is a heralding call, a call to remember the past, savor the beauty of the moment, and always, ever and again, the chance to till the sacred earth and begin anew.

— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks

© StateoftheOzarks 2025

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