Spring rhythm.

SPRING begins with flowers. That is what Swinburne wrote. "And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, / And in green underwood and cover / Blossom by blossom the spring begins." Pre-spring begins with sound.

The essential, coldest, and most threatening mark of winter is silence. Urban bustle masks it, but at night in the country it is revealed. No leaves stir; they have fallen. No streams gargle; they have frozen. No insects creak; they have died. If wind blows, it moves the tree branches with the crazed power of a force in interstellar space. You might hear a limb crack. A far-off dog is as alone and exposed as your thoughts.

The first sound to break the spell is dripping. By day, temperatures flirt with the freezing point, running above it, then coyly falling back. Even when the thermometer reports little movement, the sun is higher and stronger, and creates small Daytonas and Ft. Lauderdales on the roof. The snow piled there, like shingles dully left by the roofers of February, begins to sink. It shows a brave white face to its destroyer, but it is dissolving within. The gutters, which can handle any downpour, can't handle this. When the melt refreezes at night, they fill with rods of ice. So the water escapes over the sides, through joints, wherever there is a gap or an irregularity. In the snow beneath the corners, it drills little spa pools, miniature cold tubs. It baptizes the front step. It finds the space between your hat and your collar when you are fumbling with a key, or fetching firewood. What kind of a sample would it make? It is not funky enough for hip-hop, too slow for disco. It is a snare-drum tap for a color guard, or for a stripper from the days before health clubs taught pole dancing.

Water is moving in the trees too, and you can hear it if you tap them. Syrup can be made from hickories and birches, but the best purveyors are sugar maples. Half a dozen large ones stand in a small field by my lawn. They are not giants, they will never grace a record book, but they are big enough that birds who perch in them look impertinent and comical. They have the disheveled appearance of old ones, whether trees or people. The previous owner of my house made the field by clearing out the small stuff; the sugar maples remain, as if not wanting to go to their rooms just yet. Every year this time our friend brings over his drill and we tap a couple. Sometimes you can see dark stains where the sap is simply bursting out at the seams. The sound of water dripping off the eaves is interesting; the sound of sap dripping into buckets is thrilling. This is intimacy, for sap is like blood. Yet the sugar maples have enough to spare. They are so tall and the hydraulics of sucking sap up to their topmost branches seems so daunting, you think they might just say the hell with it. But here they are, one more time, pumping away. Climate change is interfering with maple-syrup production in New York and Vermont; in a hundred years, they say, we will be like Virginia. My trees are going out with a plink.

The other sound of pre-spring is the change that occurs in the calls of birds. Birds that do not go south for the winter are the most loyal and defiant friends of life. They cannot hibernate, so every day they must be out and about, finding something to eat somewhere. As they move, they make their calls, for whatever purpose they make them. Thomas Hardy heard a thrush that sounded as if it was hopeful; he must not have read Jude the Obscure. In pre-spring, the bird calls become louder, and more numerous. The bettors put their money down, and now their ships are coming in, yeah, wait and see. A pair of cardinals lives behind my house (they must be Eastern Rite, or post-Vatican III). They are the shyest birds, though what they gain from it I cannot imagine. He is as bright and obvious as a stop light; no amount of hanging back can conceal him, especially when their favorite bramble is leafless. Though her feathers are duller, her beak is as orange as his. Winter never vanquishes them, but only now do they make their characteristic call: Cheer cheer cheer. At this time of year, I also begin to hear and see phoebes. They love humans, or at least the building sites we provide. They have nested on the exhaust vent and on the motion light. When we tore off a room and rebuilt it, they slipped into the living room and nested on the hub of the ceiling fan. If you come too close, they dart away furtively (how can you escape detection if you leave a nest behind?). Their call is thought to be melancholy: They say their name, in a descending minor third. Yet for all that, and their drabness, they are distinguishable by their lively, flexing tails. Their reappearance, and their closeness, is a heartening sign.

Other signs will come: colors (green returning to the grass, gold to the goldfinches); Swinburne's blossoms; tree frogs; leaf-mist. Then the hit parade, multiple, unstoppable. The night will fill with voices, sighs, splashes, chirps, yips, screams, while the days will fill with everything, races at the speedway, boys riding ATVs, girls flexing their hair; also with boredom and crimes. But it all begins now, with a hundred small noises. In the beginning were the sounds. Keith Mano, NR's great writer, laid down the law on exclamation points: They may be used only in dialogue, and then only when the speaker has just been disemboweled. But this is not a law of nature. The sounds of pre-spring are a chorus, and the speakers have just come back to motion, life!