I have a black and white photo of a black dog asleep on a white sheet. The sheet has fallen from a clothesline in March, or perhaps April, decades ago. Though the snow has melted from the lawn, trees in the background are leafless on this cloudy day, warm and windy enough that my mother hung out bed sheets and pillowcases to dry.

Though I can’t see the wind, the whites are fanning out to one side, telling me there is considerable breeze from the south. The wind was strong enough to loosen one sheet from its wooden clothespins. Ranger the dog has stumbled across his good fortune on the grass, just in time for naptime – a break from his spring explorations.

Ranger took advantage of what the day handed him. That is my approach in March and April, seemingly a 61-day dicey and icy bridge between winter and full-blown spring. The two months may offer us, without waiting for our approval, more of winter, a little of spring, a feeling of summer, and then more of winter. They tease and please. They bury us in snow or boost us in spring fever.

I explore in March and April. I look for the white sheet on which to rest the hopes of spring. In childhood, I skipped along the pasture creek in search of pollywogs and frogs. I dug little ditches to drain the driveway of puddles so I could ride bicycle. I raked acorns from the lawn where the snow had melted, so I could bounce a ball off the house to simulate grounders on a ball field a month or more away.

Those were simple childhood rites of spring. Some years later I delved deeper into the season of awakening, inspired by Annie Dillard in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Of spring, Dillard wrote, “I plan to control myself this year, to watch the progress of the season in a calm and orderly fashion. In spring I am prone to wretched excess.”

March and April are not known for calm and orderly. We’d like to think that winter is over by the first day of March, or at least by the vernal equinox in the third week of March, and surely by the first day of April, all the while knowing it could be a fool’s joke; one year I snowshoed on the first day of May. Of all the seasons, spring arrives more grudgingly and haltingly than others. It takes a step forward and then two backward, then a leaping stride forward on a day that feels like May, even summer. But it’s not.

These months require patience, a stoic approach and a ready sweatshirt. And on those days when spring bursts through the budding branches, we are allowed wretched excess. We can count the robins on the lawn, see the emerging chipmunks, listen for frogs, watch winter running away down the hill. If we are fortunate, we will find the fallen white sheet on which to rest our winter weariness.

Dave Greschner, a 1975 journalism graduate at UW-Eau Claire, had a four-decade newspaper career as sports/outdoors editor at the Rice Lake Chronotype. He continues to write a weekly outdoors column for several newspapers in northwest Wisconsin, and is author of Soul of the Outdoors, released in early 2024, from which this selection was taken. The Prairie Farm native now resides in Rice Lake. To learn more, see his blog (davegreschneroutdoorjournal.org) or email davegreschner@icloud.com.