04/05/2026
There was a year the winter did not seem to end.
The snow stayed where it fell, and the cold settled deep into the ground. Even when the light began to return, it did not reach far enough to change anything. The forest felt it—the stillness, the waiting, the way nothing could begin.
At last, it turned its attention downward, into the low places where the ground stayed dark and damp beneath the snow.
“This cannot hold,” the forest said to the land. “What will loosen the ground?”
For a long moment, there was no answer. The trees would not move. The early flowers would not risk it. Nothing wanted to meet the cold first.
Then, from the swampy ground, something spoke.
“I can.”
It was a small plant, the kind most people never noticed unless they stepped too close, and even then, they rarely stayed. She grew at the edges, where forest met water, where the ground stayed soft and dark and carried the weight of everything that had come before. If you found her, it was by scent—sharp and strange, enough to make you turn away without looking too closely. Most did. She was used to that.
She had always lived there, in those overlooked places, rooted deep and waiting through the long months when nothing above moved. She did not mind the damp or the dark, and she had never needed to be wanted.
“You?” the trees asked.
“I do not mind the cold,” she said.
“The ground will not open easily.”
She shifted beneath the surface, as if already beginning.
“I will open it.”
The forest grew quiet.
“How?” it asked at last.
“I carry warmth.”
And so she rose.
She rose while the cold still held, pressing upward through soil that had not yet softened. The air was sharp with winter, but she kept her warmth close, steady and certain. Around her, the snow gave way—not everywhere, not all at once, but enough. A hollow formed where she stood, then another, the ground beneath loosening as the frost released its hold in those first hidden places.
She did not melt the winter. She opened it.
Where she rose, the earth could breathe again. Water began to move beneath the surface, and once that movement returned, the rest could follow.
By the time the forest stirred, the work had already begun—not in the open fields, not where anyone was looking, but in the dark, damp places where she had always lived.
The forest remembered.
It remembered the one who went first, the one who did not wait to be welcomed, the one who carried her own warmth and opened the way. It called her the Thaw-Bearer.
But people, noticing only the scent, gave her another name.
Skunk cabbage.
At our previous home we had skunk cabbage across the street where the wetlands are protected from development. I always admired that plant with her big beautiful leaves. What a lovely poem. Thank you at
