To be honest, I think spring in Canada is the most maddening of seasons. It can arrive well ahead of its appointed time or it can skulk around for the best part of a month before presenting itself. It can, quite literally, be over in a week or it can linger far into what we would normally regard as early summer.

It was different when I was a boy growing up in Wales. Spring in those faraway days was a season a body could rely on. It started, by general consent, if not by official decree, on March 1, St. David’s Day, named for the patron saint of Wales. Every self-respecting daffodil – the national flower of Wales – knew that it was expected to be in full bloom for the occasion, and in most gardens they grew in profusion. The weather was usually mild, the hedgerows were already in bud, the hawthorn trees were preparing to burst into bloom and lambs gambolled in the fields.

I recall St. David’s Day as being one of the very few dates on the school calendar when discipline was relaxed. In the morning, the school choir would assemble for a concert of Welsh songs, followed, of course, by the Welsh national anthem. There may have been the odd lesson or two, but by noon an unofficial holiday had been declared and we went home.

In honour of the day, my mother would prepare a special meal: perhaps a bowl of cawl, a delicious stew made from neck of lamb simmered with vegetables, followed, if one was very lucky, by pice ar y maen, Welsh griddlecakes, which were a universal favourite (and which a Toronto friend makes to this day).

But in Canada, alas, spring’s arrival is a much more uncertain affair. My 2001 calendar may be unequivocal on the point ("First day of spring," it notes under March 20), but we all know that in practical terms the season’s arrival is anything but predictable, except perhaps for those who live on the West Coast, where one can count on spring flowers being in bloom by mid-March. Writing of spring in Victoria in West magazine, the poet Susan Musgrave said: "When the rest of the country is dyeing the snow green for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re up to our short-sleeved ‘Super, Natural’ T-shirts in daffodils. There’s this warm-earth-budding-emerald, wild onion and soft rain smell."

It’s true. My wife called a friend of hers in White Rock, B.C., one Sunday in early February. "I nearly didn’t hear the phone," her friend explained when she finally answered. "I was working in the garden." Well, I thought grumpily when my wife related this information, I’d be working in my garden, too, if it weren’t buried under a metre-thick layer of ice and snow. And they’d be doing the same thing in Newfoundland, if only they could remain upright in the face of the heavy snowstorms and gale-force winds sweeping the Atlantic provinces.

Winter is undoubtedly Canada’s season, one of our international claims to fame. "Another batch of very cold air is sweeping down from Canada," says the weather forecaster on American television, explaining why Florida temperatures may dip to near freezing. And we who live north of the border smile approvingly, secretly proud of our winter’s severity and of our own we-can-take-it brand of hardiness. But despite our loyalty to winter, I’ve never heard anyone actually yearn for it. Nobody says in the late fall, "Only another month of this and, thank heaven, it will be winter."

Scarcely is winter upon us when we Canadians start seeking signs of what spring has in store and predictions of its arrival date. In this country, it seems, we need a set of recognizable milestones – or as the Saskatchewan writer and poet David Carpenter aptly says, "seasonal rituals" – to register our progress and sustain our energy through the cold, dark months of winter.

As the ancient Greeks divined their future from the cryptic utterances of the Oracle at Delphi, so we seek our own auguries – sometimes from some rather odd sources. We estimate spring’s arrival date (semifacetiously, for sure) by observing whether or not a groundhog can see its shadow in February. We ascribe all kinds of meaning to bird behaviour ("Look at all those crows," a neighbour of mine said to me last Christmas. "It’s going to be an early spring for sure"), and we enjoy arcane (and generally unfounded) explanations of natural phenomena. Early last winter we had a great display of northern lights, and an acquaintance of mine – a person of some stature in the community – asked me if I had seen it. I had. It meant, he went on to say, that we were in for a prolonged spell of extremely cold weather.

Depending on where you live in Canada, every person has his or her own set of omens. In the Prairies, for example, as David Carpenter writes in his collection of lyrical essays Courting Saskatchewan, an early hint of spring comes "when the first geese fly over your street. According to the Plains Cree, January is the Great Moon, February the Eagle Moon, and March the Goose Moon. One of [the] March rituals is to watch the great flocks of returning geese circling the creek that drains the Wanuskewin coulee.... They use this coulee for the same reasons people did hundreds and thousands of years ago. Refuge from winter.... Yearning people and yearning animals. Yearning for winter to be done."

In Central Canada, too, geese are reliable harbingers of spring, and where I live, in Prince Edward County on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, it is possible in late March and early April to lie in bed and listen, night after night, to the honking of great skeins of geese on the way to their northern nesting grounds. In daylight, I have seen several hundred in the air at the same time. Some flights have been measured by the thousands.

Interestingly enough, some species of birds appear to be governed more by the length of daylight than by other factors. Near my home, the first male red-winged blackbirds can be expected the first week of March – well ahead of their female counterparts – regardless of weather, and by the third week in March, the tree swallows show up, even in the least spring-like conditions.

Indeed, we humans can feel the call of the lengthening days, awakening us from winter’s lethargy, telling us, no matter what the weather, that spring is on its way. "It won’t be long now," you say to your neighbour, and even though you are both aware that there may be snowstorms and frigid weather yet to be endured before spring’s actual arrival, you feel that you have passed an important milestone. Some milestones – like being able to drive to and from work in the light – are relatively minor; others, such as when we put the clocks forward in most parts of Canada, are important seasonal rituals. (And even the mnemonic we use to remind ourselves of which way to adjust our clocks – "spring forward" – speaks to our subconscious urge to hasten the season’s processes of regeneration.)

In those areas of Northern Canada where the sun totally disappears in the winter, leaving the land in darkness for weeks at a time, its reappearance assumes an almost mythic significance, and some Arctic communities hold special celebrations to observe, as the Inuit have done for hundreds of years, this important annual event. The date of the sun’s reappearance, of course, varies according to the community’s latitude, but always occurs long before spring’s actual arrival. Nonetheless, it signals that the corner on winter has been turned.

This year, for example, in the Nunavut community of Igloolik, situated some 300 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle on an island off the east coast of the Melville Peninsula, the Return of the Sun festival was held on January 13, marking the day the sun first reappeared over the southern horizon, if only for a few minutes. The day-long celebrations, which involved most of the community’s 1,300 residents and a number of visitors, included the construction of a large snow house, traditional drum dances, throat singing and an Arctic fashion show.

Most of us, the vast majority of Canadians who live on the southern rim of the country, do not have to wait for the sun’s return, because it never completely goes away. But we do eagerly await its return to that point in the celestial sphere where it provides us with sufficient warmth for long enough every day to regenerate nature for another year.

IF YOU ASK a dozen friends what their favourite sign of spring is, you’re likely to get 12 different answers, ranging from the emergence of the early woodland flowers, such as hepatica and trout lily (shortly to be followed by the magnificent trillium), to the first appearance in city gardens of the easily identified, but unreliable, American robin (in many parts of Canada some of them overwinter, and in our area winter flocks of robins often exceed 100 birds).

I got a somewhat sad response when I put the question to a friend of mine who lives in Quebec. "Every year," he told me, "I used to look forward to the day – usually in late February or early March – when I would drive from Montreal to the Eastern Townships and discover that the sugar maples lining the route were festooned with little buckets to collect the sap from which the maple syrup would be distilled. The fact that the sap was running was a sure sign that spring was around the corner, and it always gave a lift to my spirits. But nearly all the maples lining the highway were felled by the ice storm of a few years ago. And I miss them with their little collecting buckets."

Fortunately, across the provincial border in eastern Ontario, most of the maples were spared. Syrup production is not only an important economic activity in our part of the country, but part of our social calendar, too. Every year, friends, each perhaps contributing a dish to a potluck supper, gather at a neighbour’s boiling shed for a "sugaring-off" party to sample the year’s production and to celebrate, perhaps a little prematurely, the end of winter. Sure, chances are there will still be more snow, but its texture will be softer and moister than the serious midwinter stuff – "sap snow," we call it – and it won’t stick around for long. And then, finally, it will be spring.

Or will it?

Well, it will be a gamble as usual. When it will come and how long it will last are matters that lie in the laps of the gods of weather. But late or early, fleetingly or prolonged, it will return. And that’s what’s important.

Some years ago, in early September, I happened to find myself in the High Arctic community of Resolute and visited the local Inuit cooperative to buy a few supplies. There had been no summer to speak of in Resolute that year. A thick layer of ice already covered the harbour and the ground was deep in snow – the place had the appearance of digging in for a long siege. Out of curiosity, I asked the person behind the coop’s counter how people in Resolute spend the winter.

I still remember her reply. "We wait for the return of the sun," she said.

And so, indeed, do all Canadians, whether we live in Windsor, Ont., or Resolute, Victoria or St. John’s. What makes spring so important to us is that, like the handful of other northern countries around the globe, we have a very deep appreciation of that life-giving commodity called sunlight.

Illustration: Katy Dockrill