Too Many Cooks

One more time that quote from Teddy Roosevelt:

"Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."

Because I like that quote so much, I'm going to present the latest installment from Hal Borland with no further blandishment:

"The Big Melt" ~ March 12th

The ice melts and you know the fundamental turn has come, no matter what happens now. We may have more snow and we certainly will have more frosty nights; but now the earth is unlocked and there will be no more long imprisonment until another winter. Upland brooks and rivers flow again, some of them in spate. Lowlands ooze. Frost in the ground slowly retreats, making quagmires of open fields, sodden sponges of pastureland. Snow that has lain in upland woodlots since December trickles away in a hundred rills.

It is a soggy time. Water is everywhere. But this is the very juice and sap of spring, this is water. It is the fluid of life. Without water the land is barren, the seed lies dormant, the bud withers unopened. Life began in the primordial waters, as nearly as we can trace beginnings, and it still needs water for its annual renewal. Only in water can the vital salts be dissolved and fed to the fundamental protoplasm. Water is the basic broth of both blood and sap.

So the water drenches the land, suffuses it, as the cold, insistent rains of March beach the ice. Melt begets more melt. Channels open. Boglands overflow. The earth is an ancient, watery planet again whose land is slowly rising to warm itself in the strengthening sun and clothe itself in green. We have had the big melt. We are ready for spring.