Will spring return?

God, Facebook. Years now since I've looked at it, but I'm big with this universal theme, the possibility of spring. We've all sometimes given up hope during this endless winter, though we know how dangerous that is. Without hope for spring it's as if we're in some circle of Dante's Inferno -- an eternal winter, eternal hopelessness. Icicles dangling from the tip of your nose, eyelids frozen together, toes perpetually falling off from frostbite. Something like the killzone on Everest. For me the best part of spring is the signs. I have to stretch my neck to see the patch of snow in a neighbor's yard, and the patch is pathetic. Driving by the carwash, I saw a dozen cars lined up, expressive as the return of migrating birds. Any day now I'll hear the first motorcycle. But the major indicators for me are the buds on my naked Japanese maple. All winter the hard knots of winter buds looked frozen solid, coiled as if they'd never uncoil again. I don't know exactly what modicum of life goes on in those hard coils, just that it's hunkered down as tight as life can be. That tree's my window tree, the one I look at when I'm working at the computer. I take it in many times each day. And this mild morning I'm almost sure I see "it' -- not so much a greening as a faint golding ("nature's first green is gold," as Robert Frost said). It's like the moment when you look at a woman in a certain way and she returns that look. Yes, it will be, it will be.