It is the liquid season. Everything that has been solid and defined for months is melting in a rush. The stream behind our house has tripled in the night.

Yesterday as I leapt from the snowy yard down onto the deck � a deck that in warmer weather is three steps up from the grass � I heard the noise that always means spring, the tell-tale rattling calls of the sandhill cranes. I looked up and saw a great group of them wheeling high over the house. They were magnificent, great white birds with their legs streaming behind. They were flying so high that they were mere specks, really, but somehow their soaring height just made them more impressive, more regal. Tears sprang to my eyes as I let everything drop and just stared at them while all around me solids turned to liquids and rushed, down my face, down the hill.

I have come to rely on the signs that things are changing. I count on the solidity of the moon in the night sky, or its grey-blue ghost in the early morning. I watch sunrises and sets, taking note of the colors and the angle of the light. I make checkmarks on an imaginary list: robins, cranes, kingfishers, orioles, summer.

As I trudged down to the pond in my giant winter boots, I wondered if I could still survive in the city, a place where the signs are hidden and infinitely more subtle, where the signs pass through an intermediate stage of human contact. The fountains turn on, the planters change clothes, the crumbs left for pigeons pile up, the el runs extra trains to Wrigley Field, summer.

Two weeks from today I will set my bare toes on the sand of a beach I�ve known for nearly all my life. For the last week, every night I close my eyes and imagine the trek from my mother�s house. I adjust the seat of my bicycle, bump down the shell-paved drive to the street, and turn right. A block or so up the road, I turn right onto the path that curves around to the bridge over the end of the lagoon and plunges through a miniature jungle and out onto the end of an empty cul-de-sac. I pedal up the road past the displaced Cape Cod cottage, past the house we always suspected was haunted, across the road. Under the jasmine vine on the other side is a nearly hidden path. There was once a small sign with an arrow and a picture of an umbrella, but it�s so overgrown that it�s hard to find it now. I park my bike on the rack just beyond the alligator topiary and continue on foot, past the walled gardens, past the beach roses (I can hear the waves!) and up the boardwalk that crawls over the dunes like the spine of a dinosaur until at the top of the second incline I can see that first breathtaking view of ocean. The sliver of beach is narrow here at high tide, full of tide pools when the water is out. There are always trawlers silhouetted against the sky, followed by clouds of gulls. If you�re lucky, you will see the pink belly of a dolphin rolling over in the waves. In my mind, I sit down on the warm, shifting sand with my feet on the cool damp part. I can smell the beach smells and hear the sounds of waves and sandpipers and gulls. I sit there until I fall asleep.

In two weeks there will be another list, a list of the seven states we must cross to get to my favorite place. We will check them off as we note the new signs of spring, those that arrive in a matter of hours as we journey southward, signs as ubiquitous as Waffle Houses. Grass, leaves, flowers, kudzu, home.

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