William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Out in the fields/woods, while Flint chased what he contended was a fox, it was a transitional day – or a day that gave the illusion of transition. With a mild west breeze, it was more like margins of January and margins of March and April overlapped, throwing the day out of time. Patches of granular icy snow bordered lanes of thawed mud the more slippery for overlaying frozen earth. Ahead on the jeep trail, the sun bounced off a wet mat of dead leaves and snow melt. In the cutover field of scrubby trees, the immature trees let in the strong sunlight, but today you could believe it was the force of the sun that blasted the field and stunted the trees.

The sun was merely making a feint toward another season. For someone like me, with my vague grasp of the calculus behind the duration of winter, it seems on a day like this that the sun can do anything, that it can hold back and keep winter here, or pour down and make winter spring.