I am hungry for release from winter’s power. I imagine, hopefully, that the buds on the oak trees are a little fatter and the pine needles greener. If everything is ready to bloom when permitted, I am ready to say the word. But in fact the earth turns, and there has been a gradual increase in daylight for two months. The skunk cabbage has already reacted. The conical tips of its buds are pushing through frozen ground, showing that all life is not confined to pumping hearts. The ferment goes on in many ways, although the imperturbable action of a skunk cabbage, following the global year’s own pace, is not something to give me as much cheer as a blue bird’s song. Zero and subzero weather is unfamiliar on the Cape and when it comes it feels incalculably cold. It is face-burning, dry, and piercing. Icy, crackling abysses hang in the air. There is a fire in a neighboring town. A small clothing store has caught fire in the early morning when the proprietor was away. Leaden gray smoke lifts above it through heavy walls and winds of cold into the sky. A small crowd gathers on the other side of the street. They stamp hard, hold on to their ears, and watch the fire truck hurling tons of water into the black interior of the store, a little yellow frame building with nothing left to it but its name--the letters still showing on a dirty sign above the door. A stove caused it, they say. They wonder whether the man had any insurance. Was this all he had? They watch in sympathy. They walk away saying: “Who cares!” They laugh, and as the fires show signs of going out, they cry for more. What is there in us that cries out for disaster and responds so readily to accidents? I hear brutality and kindness, all in the same crowd, cold laughter and silent sympathy. Here are our meetings, all in the one extreme of a winter day, showing the allowances and shifts in human weather ... hidden fires almost seen. In a day’s time the great cold is gone. Frost still lies deep in the ground. The twigs of shrubs and trees shiver wildly and delicately. The sun strikes us more directly. It sheathes the tree tops and a running slate-blue sea, and the day seems more open, receptive to that release I look for; but there might be a magic there that will pass before I find it. I spend as much time stumbling as in discovery, stumbling over debris, cans, and broken glass, like this stretch of drab ground just off the highway, bordering a salt marsh. It has the grim look of scalped ground, having been robbed of its topsoil. The only life is a starling, perched on a bare sumac. At the edge of the marsh I clamber over colorless litter, logs, branches, piles of thatch shoved in and rocked by the tides. Things seem tediously dead.