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The End of Winter, According to Skunk Cabbage
By February I start feeling that familiar tug, the one that doesn’t match the calendar or the weather. The woods still look locked in place, the air still has that metallic edge, and snow hangs on in the shaded places. But something in me leans forward anyway, as if the season might be loosening in ways only the wetlands can sense. That’s usually when I head out to look for skunk cabbage.
I don’t think of it as a spring ritual. It’s an end‑of‑winter ritual, a small act of faith that something is shifting beneath the frozen surface. I go when the ground still crunches underfoot, when it feels a little premature, maybe even a little foolish. And yet, more often than not, I find them—those mottled purple spathes pushing up through cold soil, declaring in their quiet way that winter has overstayed its welcome. Sometimes they’re tucked into seeps where groundwater keeps things just warm enough. Sometimes they’re surrounded by snow, the white pulled back in a perfect ring around each plant. That’s the giveaway: skunk cabbage makes its own heat. While everything else is locked down, it’s warming the air inside its hooded shell, melting the snow at its feet, refusing to wait for permission.
I always crouch beside the first one I find. The flower itself is nothing showy—a knobby yellow spike hidden inside that bruise‑colored hood—but it feels like a declaration of endurance. Not a trumpet blast of spring, but a quiet insistence that life is already underway, even if the world still looks asleep.
The leaves won’t appear for weeks. When they do, they’ll be enormous—bright green, deeply veined, rising from the plant’s base like something tropical misplaced in a Wisconsin wetland. But in February, all I get is the spathe, three to six inches tall, mottled like an animal trying not to be seen. It’s enough.
Maybe that’s why I go looking for them so early. I’m not chasing spring; I’m searching for the hinge between seasons, the moment when winter loosens just enough for something to slip through. Skunk cabbage doesn’t announce anything with fanfare. It simply shows up, warming its own small world, reminding me that change often begins quietly, in places no one is watching.
By the time cranes return and red‑winged blackbirds start shouting from the cattails, skunk cabbage will already be well on its way—leaves unfurling, roots anchored deep in the muck. But I’ll remember that February morning when I found the first one, half‑hidden in snow, doing the improbable work of ending winter from the inside out.
(EW)