Skunk Cabbage

It’s cold here, still. In the evenings I still go running in my parka. The air is clean and chill; I can see my breath. The woods on either side of the dirt road are still brown and grey. Nothing is green. Spring is keeping herself dark – though I know she’s around: the bare grey branches are full of birdsong. The red-winged blackbirds have arrived, with their liquid warbling calls, and a huge flock of robins were busy in the hillside meadow last week.

Down the road there’s a small pond. It’s just a widening of the stream, really – a narrow sheet of clear black water, with a bottom of dead leaves. The pair of mallards is back, and every afternoon I see them in the dark water, ducking their heads into it, paddling about in the current. I can taste it: cold and pure and woodsy. They’re getting ready to nest.

But that’s not all. In the boggy parts, where the hillside drops down from the road, the aliens have arrived. Rising slowly up from the dead browns of last year’s grasses are motionless spirals of leaves, twisting upward through the swampy ground like corkscrews.

What is it about spotted things that is so strange, so sinister? These leaves are otherworldly and unexpected – they’re brown, mottled, striped, and bruise-yellow, electric-green, birthmark-purple – and the flecks on them are everywhere, tiny and dark, myriad and ominous, like insects. The leaves are wide and fleshy and twisted. They curl sensuously around their own fat center, roiling upwards toward a sharp tip: skunk cabbage.

First plant of the season, spring’s handwritten announcement. Everything around it is old, dry, cast-off, dead, but it doesn’t matter. These strange, winding, spotted, twisted leaves have appeared (rising up from the wintry earth, potent, vivid, reminding us that there’s a lot we don’t know, that beauty is more varied and foreign than we remembered) and so has spring.