Winter won’t end for another month, but life is stirring. In Ferndale, if you look carefully, buds are beginning to color and soften everywhere. Spring bulbs are thrusting green leaves out of the ground and in protected places where the sun hits, a bloom here and there adds a bright flash of color to the drab winter foliage.
Yesterday, I went out to the farm to check on the progress of awakening life. Snowdrops are showing up all over and have been for a couple weeks now. I missed visiting the farm earlier this season during our snow days, but I will bet the green blades and white flowers of the snowdrops were poking through the snow, justifying their name and adding welcome grace to the scene. Snowdrops are not a native species of the Pacific Northwest. I suspect either my grandmother or my mother planted them around the house. Now, patches of snowdrops show up in the woods and windbreaks, even along Waschke Road. They may be invasive, but I welcome the gentle little flowers and tender leaves that are the first proof of longer days. In a month, they will be almost invisible and forgotten.
My grandson Dario and I saw two deer in the woods. Deer are all over now. I see them in the early morning in Ferndale, dashing between houses and sampling the ornamentals. I suppose people think of them as destructive pests, but when I was growing up, it seemed that everyone in Whatcom County hunted deer. Venison was a change from beef and pork. The animals were a rare sight. Now, the county is so filled with people, hunting almost anywhere in lowland Whatcom is recklessly dangerous and the deer have thrived.
I welcome the graceful and diffident animals and enjoy finding their delicate hoof prints when I’m out walking. When I was growing up, deer never bothered my parents and grandparents’ gardens, but now, fences and deer repellent are required if you mind bites taken from the middle of your best looking pumpkin. Going out to gather the first tender garden salad of the year and finding rows of greens chewed down to the dirt overnight could make a person grind their teeth. I remember once seeing deer chased out of the pasture by milk cows and I wonder if the deer would be scarcer if more cattle were around now.
Spring was certainly progressing in the woods. Tiny, tender nettles were showing. We never ate nettles, but some of the neighbors, I can’t remember who, used to pick tender nettle sprouts in the early spring and cook them into nettle soup. I never tasted their soup; never have I had the slightest desire to taste nettle soup. I know nettles too well from the stings I used to get on my arms and legs while running through the woods where the nettles grew in masses of emerald green, although, when I think of it now, nettles have a sort of refreshing smell. When I was a kid, I heard of old folks rubbing their joints with nettles for their rheumatism. The tiny new ones already have a sting.
The Indian plums, which my grandpa called “hardhack” along with all other species of pliant, tough, and hard-to-chop shrubs, had unfurled a few tiny leaves and white flowers. Despite the sweet name, the leaves and flowers have a sharp bitter smell when you crush them in your fingers. The floor of the woods was green with deer fern, which is not a sign of spring because deer ferns, unlike bracken or fiddlestick ferns, for which Ferndale was named, are green all year round. They say deer graze 
on deer fern during the winter, but the leaves are tough and leathery. My mother considered deer fern roots a treat. She would dig out the thick roots (rhizomes) brush off the dirt and chew the raw roots. They have a sweet licorice taste. I haven’t tasted a deer fern root in sixty years.
Something to try again.