Bud season, stick season, and almost simultaneously with or just prior to our mud season, in Maine. These shadows of things-to-come appear reluctantly and seem endless. One day I see shadows first in yellow, rust, and gradually in nut brown. The yellow ones are the most encouraging, because they hold a specific portent of flowers and blooms. Not a scent to be had, but the shadow or halo of color. When I first see them emerging, it is like a memory or portent of what is to come, but I don’t know how I know it, rather it seems as if I feel color that has bubbled its way up from a past life. I see a things outlined, that will god willing unfurl to become more.

I have learned, mostly because of work in the theatre, that color is located as much in light as in pigment. As a child I had simply believed color was in the paint or crayon and far later had made the discovery of color baed in light. As I was learning about stage lighting I learned about basic color techniques in a new way. To mix color in paints, I knew that putting red and green together gave me shades of blue. Paint is additive, and light by way of contrast has different prime colors and works through subtraction. Color is taken away to produce a spectrum that is then the color as it is left. Our eyes and our televisions work that way, too. We see the color that remains after subtracting light. As we have come to know such color is made of pixels. Individual dots of color, which we then mix and add within our eyes and brains. Isn’t it something of a wonder that we profess to know color at all?

This spring in Maine the “pointillism” of color is made of tints or hints, nothing like the richness of Rembrandt, more like the muted colors of George Surat. Cloud and rain are primary keys to these spring colors. If I am fooled, as I look at budding trees and bushes, I tend to wonder what they’ll become, given only subtle hints. Each in due time. Some early, who regress early. Some seem like they’ll never show themselves. All of them framed by moisture. The rain and cloud cover is an ever-present mood that dominates this spring.

The first day of official spring, or the sun’s equinox, is March 20. Here in Maine, there have been many “snow days,”as well as frost nights, far later than that date and even the Farmer’s Almanac suggests we hold off on planting until May 1. So the equinox is just the sun’s way of letting us know that Spring will come, but it’ll likely be after at least the full month of April is over. Or as Shakespeare has Hamlet say:

this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof, fretted
with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. (II, 2)

So as Hamlet admits he’s in a funk, we can’t help but join him, in the painful days during March and April that we spend longing for Spring. Certainly I thrill each year when the robbins arrive; and as I begin to repeatedly hear cardinals singing and staking out their full throated turf. My heart leaps to see them guarding their respective treetops. In that “forever-time” of waiting through the month of March we feel the Lions and Lambs of memories that have been promised us in respective entrances and exits rolling more than once through the days.

To refer again to my days in the theatre, we always await the cue for “lights up, at beginnings” (for example, Act I). In such a cue as if for April Fool, the grasses and leaves begin low and slowly fade up to their eventual color and growth. Here’s the truth, in contrast to this, theatre light as well as photographic light flows from top down. Lights are typically hung from either poles or batons geared to achieve ”ideal angles.” For lighting actors their most attractive would be 45 degrees both up and to the side.

To modify the excitement calling: “lights up” brings, I’d suggest that certainly one of my fond theatrical lighting cues is a “cross fade”. To finish my metaphor, the vegetation in Act I turns green as the vegetation from low ever-so-gradually works it’s way up; while the sun is at its new angles coming from high to low. So for me while the buds and flowering trees are in the midst of the brown or red-brown phase, the ground has gone full green leading the way. I love find myself waiting now for the crossfade to finish between high to low giving us finally, full spring. The world in spring clothes looking its best. And it is the reverse of a quick theatrical demonstration, as it moves from low to high. The top of trees are often still rust colored buds, and the grass and bushes are new full-blown fresh spring green at its crispest. So this cross fade between the vegetation and the light feels like it reaches for the height of theatricality, but at a painfully slow pace taking the whole damn month of April, and so far two weeks of May to bring color to the picture.