We live on a busy street in Chicago. These two lanes cut through most of the north and south sides, and are often used a backup for drivers routing around the city’s endless construction. There’s usually a steady flow of traffic, pedestrian revelry, ambulance sirens, window-shaking bass, and reggaetón. In short, it can get loud.

When I first moved into the apartment, I didn’t know how I was going to handle all the noise. Even with the windows closed, the sounds aren’t muted completely, just muffled. My first few months of opening the front door was enough to routinely startle and distress. Five years have since passed. And though the noise is still there, now I’m pretty used to it. Wooden floor squeaks and blender rumbles mix with the constant din of the city beyond.

Mornings mean breakfast in the east-facing kitchen, where we turn sleepy faces toward the hot sun and watch, swaying in the breeze, a quarter mile of treetops. The loud concrete crackle in front of our apartment becomes a quiet green echo in back, the sounds softening through the filter of wind and leaves. Occasionally we can hear the distant roar of the El train and the hefty puff of a passing bus, but what we hear most is birds.

The birds were here as soon as the word ‘spring’ shivered on the city’s tongue. The giant tree next door was brought down last fall, so now our towering callery pear tree serves as the avian highrise for so many pairs of tiny wings. The tree’s leaves fill in more with every warm day. Hidden by foliage, we rarely see the birds, but by our ears we know they’re there.

There’s one we hear so clearly. Her plaintive song rebounds against our brick building and pierces through the chirping clamor. It’s loud and unmistakeable. Three minor notes, descending in order, held long until they warble. I haven’t heard her before this year. Maybe the extended cold spring keeps her here longer than nature would have wanted. Some furious internet research led me to believe she’s a golden-crowned sparrow, a western bird that typically flies north and south along the Pacific coast, but whose habitat appears to be expanding east. An expansion, I assume, motivated by the extreme fluctuations of our new weather norms.

Along with the rattle of a faulty engine and the soaring sweep of an airplane overhead, I keep an ear out. For the sparrow. For her three long notes. For the shuffle of a warm breeze through green coin leaves. For the trickle of a hose, feeding budding sprouts in the raised bed nextdoor. For the clink-sigh of a beer can opening on a nearby patio, and the sizzle of a steak on a neighbor’s dusty grill. For the cement crack and hard wood drill of construction machinery across the street. For the car horns and the geese honks, drifting through an open window on a cool pink evening.

The great reward at the end of a long flat gray rainy day is the cool neon blue the sky turns after the sun goes down. For a brief while it glows, like an idled desktop monitor, and every wet surface reflects default blue and streetlight amber. Some days the cover breaks and you can see the wispy remains of the storm’s slate gray clouds, drifting left into darkness.

Last night I missed my connecting bus, and so walked the ten minutes to my house in the cold spring rain. When the initial anger of tail-light syndrome passed, I turned my attention to the sound of car tires sizzling against wet pavement, and how dark black the bare tree branches looked after a full day’s soak. It’s holding on tight, that part of spring when the trees are still sleeping. There are a few high achievers, but most haven’t changed since the last leaf dropped in fall. I kept an eye out for blooming bulbs, most hanging heavy heads and nodding under rhythmic droplets. I lingered alongside the low strip of land next to the local park fieldhouse — already covered in weeds that wasted no time making their eager return above ground.

My eyes caught the last of the blue glow after climbing the stairs to my apartment. It quickly deepened, then settled into the matte graybrown of an urban night sky. The brick buildings across the street pulled on their muddy orange bedclothes, reflecting the streetlights’ shadowed shine, and the hiss of commuting cars one story below echoed again to the north and to the south.

I smelled Spring today.

It’s incredible the things you forget you’re missing during the long pause of winter. The things you learn to live without when you have no other choice.

I smelled Spring today during my walk through the park. It smelled of damp dirt.

It wasn’t a spectacular smell. Not bad. Just normal. But noteworthy in its ordinariness. It hinted at possibility, at the changes to come. At the tiny sprouts preparing to emerge from newly thawed ground. Waiting, like tiny toddler dancers. Jittering in the wings, poised to take the stage at their spring showcase.

I saw Spring on the branches of the Purple Leaf Plum tree behind our apartment. Its bare, dusty branches bejeweled with tiny round buds, sitting quietly on forked arms reaching up toward the warming sun. The tips of the nearby Callery Pear are likewise adorned and will soon burst into musky white blooms.

I saw Spring reflected in the curb puddles and the snowmelt and the stillwater collected in last Summer’s plastic planters. I saw it in the return of gardening displays in brightly lit retail spaces. Lime green gloss varnish cover stock and double walled cardboard seedpack towers. Mass-produced eyecatchers reminding us it’s almost time to put our hands back in the ground.

I heard Spring this morning in the chirps of the sideyard sparrows and singing wrens. In the sweet call of the bright red cardinal that’s made its way back to our tree. Or maybe it never flew south at all, just huddled in the cracks between roof shingles on the coachhouse, waiting out winter’s loose handful of flurries.

I heard Spring in the sounds of waking up, sounds drifting up from one floor down. A deadbolt’s loud clunk and the squeal of a back door creaking open: hopeful neighbors testing the air to see if it’s warm enough for the season’s first porch-bound beer.

I felt Spring in the sliver of warm light that slipped through the gap in my bedroom curtains. Resting on my face, incrementally earlier and stronger than the morning before. In the mild dash of wind that slid through my jacket zipper while waiting on the train platform high above Fullerton Avenue. In the marked increase of humidity in the air, and the unfamiliar touch of dew that leaped from greening grass and soaked through unsealed boot gussets.

The way it usually goes in Chicago is: Spring feels very far away for a long time. You walk through the entirety of winter, nose buried behind scarf and collar, eyes locked to the space directly in front of you. You whine for warmth, but you don’t dare look for it on the ground and in the trees. Until one day, it’s suddenly just there. A green leaf poking up from beneath withered mulch. A spray of purple growth on an old yellow lawn. A pop of color where there once was none. An open door.

Soon there will be bright green tree flowers hovering high overhead, creamy magnolia blossoms, and long legged tulips. We’ll bask in the sudden abundance with feasts of snow peas garlic scapes asparagus fava beans ramps. Leaves of every shape and size and texture will push through hardened bark and twist and turn toward the sun. Bulky raindrops will announce their arrival with heavy taps at double-paned glass, searching wildly for roots to wet.

But for now, we’re just at the beginning. And I’m enjoying our early Spring with as many senses as I can.

At one of my previous jobs, when I needed to escape I would cross the street and go to the bookstore. My boss and I would sometimes claim we went there to do research, or tell each other we were going to refresh and be inspired. More often than not, we were just going there to get away. When the cubicle walls felt too close, the fluorescent lights too harsh, the coworkers too demanding or out of touch, there was the bookstore.

I eventually left that job and, soon after, that bookstore went out of business. But the need to escape remains. So I walk through the park. I usually do it in the morning, when I’m feeling hopeful and there’s still some brightness in the sky. Some days I do it in the late afternoon when the minutes are moving at half their usual speed and the sun, hidden behind thick cloud cover, speeds toward the horizon. I do the walk everyday, and I let the shadows and colors and textures distract me. It’s not always pretty, but it’s always there, and it’s always changing.

On the coldest days, the ground is as hard as pavement, indistinguishable from sidewalk or igneous rock. It’s a quiet trek, occasionally sprinkled with the darting eyes and hurried hellos of passing strangers. The abrasive rhythm of snow crunching underfoot crowds out the motorized whizz of cars and the hiss of the kneeling Montrose bus. Cloudy rings of bright blue ice gleam, surrounded by thinned patches of yellowing grass.

When a thaw moves in, solid ground that’s pitched and angled from last week’s frozen footsteps starts to give again. Tiny chunks of dirt and slush clump and creak beneath heavy steps. Bunches of shredded leaves huddle near wide tree trunks, the weak brown shards crushed flat under the speckled sun. The great green gazebo spreads wide its shadow over broad drifts of snow.

As the weather turns briefly, blindly toward spring, the field becomes an obstacle course. The rain comes, the ground swells with water, and the dirt puffs up into mud. Animals return to drink, and search for food. I tread lightly over rooted sod, careful not to step too hard and twist it clean from the earth. Floor-bound nests of fallen twigs support my weight and keep me from sinking ankle deep into black sludge, my rubber soles sucking against the wet earth with each step.

And the next day, the freeze returns. The melt, once again, hardened into solid crystal.

Instead of thinking about the cubicle walls or the fluorescent lights, these walks keep me in real time, reacting with and against the landscape. I’m learning why some people hike the same trails year after year, this small stretch of public park as my teacher. Even near a tangle of busy intersections, among the roar of traffic and constant construction, I can hear the earth breathe. I can see it sigh.

One day soon, we’ll turn toward the sun and the land will open up to welcome a new season. It will push up new sprouts and nurture them on their way to becoming great trees. It will embrace the eager picnickers who rest in new grass and pull corks from chilled green bottles of white. But the park, even in winter, shows me something new. It shows me that change doesn’t have to wait until spring. I walk by it everyday.

Welles Park is a big, beautiful park located in Lincoln Square on the northwest side of the city. Summer brings giant, lush fields (often filled with hundreds of summer camp kids). In winter, it’s much emptier and the perfect place for quiet and contemplation. It’s well worth a visit any time of year.

A Midwestern snowstorm is the closest I’ve ever come to living in a black and white photograph. Depending on the severity of the weather system, I feel like I’m inside the grainy halftone photo that accompanies an appropriately dramatic headline. I’m the tiny figure, hooded and huddled in a blindingly lit bus shelter, surrounded by swirls of white dust, back to the wind. I’m the speck of black in the whiteout.

There’s very little color in this world. The sky, once vibrant and blue, is now dull and completely white. Contrast has faded and shadows that were strong and rich have all lost their depth. Weeks or sometimes months pass before we realize we’ve forgotten what sunlight looks like, or that it was a thing we once enjoyed in abundance. We’re in the midrange now, gray and flat. This is winter.

I know there’s beauty in this season, just as there is in all the others, but here in the middle of the city, it’s harder to find. Here snow blows like a strong gust of wind, sideways, and often mixed with icy sleet and aggressive hail. As green as Chicago is in the summer, winter’s overwhelming lack of green is always a cruel surprise that I never feel quite ready for.

I try to look around with different eyes. I stare deeply at the angled geometry of bare tree branches, finding the tops and bottoms of every split and fork. I keep an eye open to the marbling of crunchy snow on sidewalk, the sandy and silty mix of shades underfoot. I watch as car tires kick up thick pancakes of snow, and as puffs of breath float into the air, little clouds released by those of us who are unlucky enough to be stuck outside.

In the street, the fallen snow is hardening into solid drifts, and the trees are sinking deeper into their annual slumber. Squirrels are digging frantically for the morsels they hid away just a few short weeks ago and crows stand sentinel, squawking wildly and pushing a sharp rhythm into the cold silence. Giant opaque icicles are forming, slowly, steadily growing longer and wider with every successive freeze and thaw.

I know there’s a beauty to it. I just have to look closer to find it.

The day after the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year and the official start to winter — we watched a torrential downpour gush from our roof and splash soil and last summer’s coriander seeds all over our porch. An hour later, sunshowers. And an hour after that, a brilliant blue-orange sunset lit up all the west-facing greystones. That night, great gusts of wind shoved against our rickety double-paned windows and bowed huddles of basswood trunks. After midnight, when the winds died down, a heavy gray mass of clouds settled over the pitch navy sky, the ordered shades of flint, smoke, and blue slate hovering in their places.

The transitions from season to season are typically manic here, except for winter. It grabs hold of fall, strangling its leaves and burying them in feet of sooty snow and black ice. It announces its arrival loudly, and then marches on through the months, bleeding deep into spring, delaying the bulb sprouts and the return of sun and warmth. It’s the season that’s the most reliable. The most real.

But this year, it’s in hiding. It snowed twice, and melted twice. And now the mercury can’t even drop below freezing. It’s been damp and gray, and then bright and dry. The magnolias have started to bud and a bright red cardinal has taken up residence in the tree behind our house. Why fly all the way south? Chicago is the new Baton Rouge.

This false spring has got us all confused. What will happen to the plants that have been lulled from their dormancy by the increasingly moody climate? When — and I never imagined myself asking this question — will winter get here? While I may not think I particularly benefit from the cooling and slowing of this season, the plants definitely need it. They need the pause, the deep sleep before they can grow again, with renewed vigor below a strengthened sun.

So we’ll continue to wait for winter. We’ll continue to look for it behind every temperature drop and howl of wind. And we’ll continue to festoon our homes with evergreen boughs and reminisce the days long ago when snow stuck and daffodils didn’t bloom in November.

About halfway between Chicago and the Iowa state line, the reliably flat topography of Illinois makes a dramatic shift. Here you’ll find the dells. These great canyons formed when glacial pressure overpowered the surrounding limestone and sandstone, piercing through the earth to make way for flora, fauna, and eventually watersport enthusiasts. Nestled beneath the broad, blue Illinois River, the geology of Matthiessen State Park rolls and juts and spikes and pools before arching clear overhead, its basic elements proudly on display. Wood, water, earth. Calcium, iron, carbon.

The hike into the park offers your typical Illinois vegetation: hackberry and pin oak trees, clumps of goldenrod and ironweed. When the winding path stops short, you’ll see the gap. From the canyon rim, your eyes will trick you. You’ll think the floor below is close, a reasonable, respectful, Midwestern distance. You’ll think the felled trees are thin, new growth and the scattered rocks, stepping stones.

But then you’ll see people down below, humans made minuscule by distance and perspective. Bodies dwarfed by the rock walls, their voices carrying through the cavern, amplified by bowed basalt. In the valley, the stone changes color from gorge to gorge, sandy beige and deep umber at Cedar Point give way to silver and scarlet in the Devil’s Paint Box. Liverworts, mosses, and bracken ferns cling to the shady side of the canyon while the crisp fall sun pushes slender tree trunk shadows against the rough ridge.

Just across Route 71 is the more popular Starved Rock State Park. Familiar and foreign in the lay of its land, wooded forests line steep yellow cliffs while shallow creeks wind through stark gray gulches. At the top of a long bluff stands Council Overhang, a geological outcropping that looks to have more in common with the moon than with the nearby prairie. Its great mouth yawns and hovers wide around us, the sandstone threatening to chomp closed in a few thousand years.

Curve around the bend and forge a few more stream crossings until you hear rushing water. At Ottawa Falls, the last of spring’s runoff cascades into a deep pool, mushrooms cling to dormant tree trunks, and names of wayward hikers are etched deep into sandy crag. The late afternoon light glows yellow in these hidden corridors, catching in thin-veined leaves, and reflecting off the grooved walls above.

These parks are magical in their incongruity, in their perfect strangeness within the greater context of the local landscape. This is an otherworldly place where farmland brushes right up against rocky ledge and canyon. An area that forces you to imagine its tense and fitful creation when ravines were violently carved from glacial rock and cliffs were blasted free from bluff.

After dinner at the lodge paired with pints of Starved Rock Signature Ale, our group began the two hour journey back to Chicago. We watched the hot, orange sun dip and then drop below the treeline, taking our day at the dells with it. The van pushed forward, back to flat land, back to the city.

Matthiessen State Park and Starved Rock State Park are located a few minutes from each other in North Central Illinois. Instead of renting a car for the journey, I traveled to and through the parks with the REI Outdoor School. They provided transportation, food, and trail guidance for the full day. This post was not sponsored, I just loved the trip and would gladly recommend it to others.

A new park recently opened on the far north side of Chicago. Park #568 lies in a previously unused corner of Rosehill Cemetery. They claim no bodies have ever been buried here, though from certain corners of the site, you can see straight through the chain link fence toward the westernmost headstones. There’s a strange feeling in the air. Felled trees criss-cross throughout the park, some half buried in the central fishing pond, strangled limbs reaching upward from a watery grave.

A few boardwalks snake through newly planted prairie grasses. The native woodland trees stand tall and thin, shooting fifty, sixty feet into the air before multiplying and dividing into thousands of tiny twigs. Most woody plantings have already lost their leaves — the forest floor, a multicolored carpet of maroons and purples, decomposing crab apples, and cleverly disguised wildlife. We spot a Giant Walkingstick, thin and brown, legs tipped in lime green. Body bouncing as he takes uncertain steps, slowly approaching the asphalt path.

There are dozens of signs scattered throughout the park asking visitors to stay on the trails, but many don’t. Or can’t. The adults are generally respectful. Though I imagine asking rambunctious kids to walk quietly along the walkway, observing nature from a safe distance, is a crazy request. Deep woods are where secrets are shared, and inside jokes are born, and the best swords are fashioned out of dead branches. Even for me, the pull to abandon the path is strong. There’s a certain quality of light and shadow you can only experience when you’re surrounded by trees. You can’t hear that familiar cottony squish of leaves and mud when there’s only paved clearing underfoot.

But we stick to the trail. And listen to mothers share news of their most successful nieces. Wander alongside families eating identical PB&Js and miniature explorers hunting wild mushrooms. Watch through the fencing as 49B buses and pickup trucks hurtle down busy Western Avenue, windshields glittering as brightly as ripples on the pond.

Park #568 is located near the intersection of Western and Ardmore, one block south of Peterson Ave. The park is free to the public and open from dawn till dusk.

I recently went apple picking for the first time in my life. Four friends and I met up for an early city brunch and then ventured an hour away to Sturtevant, Wisconsin. We sang along to our playlist as the highway took us past corporate campuses and cropland. At our destination, we gorged on donuts and sipped hot, tart, spiced cider while a man wearing a dreamcatcher played Abba on pan pipes. The petting zoos and pig races and corn mazes were all swollen with people drunk on fall. We caught a hayride deep into the orchard.

I’m clearly not a veteran, but I think the magic of apple picking might lie in the fantasy that everything you see belongs to you. Even if just for a moment. We wandered up and down endless rows of dwarf trees. All ours. The entrance fee bought us the freedom to taste as many pieces of fruit as we wanted. Dozens of varietals growing on dozens of acres — flashes of red and yellow called to us from behind giant patches of green. The fields were quiet and calm. You could hear the crunch of a newly bitten Jonathan or Cortland from beyond the treetops, the sound jumping from row to row.

We wandered deeper into the property and found our way to the Enchanted Forest, a wild recess from the geometric farm park. The perfectly planted grove gave way to thick backwoods where dappled sunlight squeezed through tiny openings in the canopy. We walked slowly, eyes craning up and around, leaves crunching underfoot.

Eventually the forest receded, the sky widened, and we were back in the farm. We got serious about filling our half peck bags with as many apples as we could grab, searching for the most perfect specimens and standing on tippy toes to collect them. The light began to lean lower as we wandered back through the orchard, past the dusty pumpkin patch, and back toward the entrance gates. The sound of pan pipes returned. As did the sounds of teenage yelps and car engines and cash registers.

The transition back from nature to civilization is always an awkward one. Even a man-made apple orchard can deliver the feeling of escape that an urbanite craves after one too many cramped subway rides. For a few hours that Saturday, we disappeared. We climbed and stretched and tasted fruit fresh from the tree. We heard new sounds. We heard fewer sounds. We shared stories and laughed. We were quiet. We looked closely. We took a break from worry. We breathed.

And for the next week, we ate delicious apples that reminded us of our fall day in Wisconsin.

Apple Holler is located halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee at 5006 S. Sylvania Avenue in Sturtevant, Wisconsin. The orchard is open everyday from 9am-5pm.

My eyes are constantly scanning the streets, staring deeply at every tree. Trying to memorize them exactly as they are during this time of year. Fall is fleeting in Chicago. I imagine many people feel this way in climate zones similar to mine. Every day looks different.

We don’t get the thick, rich patchwork of New England color. Or Colorado’s yellow Aspen explosion. But fall still comes here. Trees that stood proud and green for months — bold and persistent in their aliveness — suddenly burst into plum, gold, rust. And the next day, the leaves are gone, the trees’ newly bared limbs reaching, silhouetted against a sharp sky. The city is bare again. You can see the siding and the concrete and the power lines and all the crumbling infrastructure that’s been camouflaged since May. As spring is a season of awakening, fall is the season of retreat. Both periods of transition, but in fall, the movement is toward silence, sparseness, rest. Some like to say it’s the time for turning inward. For plant lovers, it’s a bit of a sad goodbye.

But of course, fall is unmistakably beautiful. Trees turn, in as many different ways as there are trees. Some glow from the crown downward, seemingly warmed by months of strong summer sun. Others begin to yellow from underneath, glittering only for those who remember to look up. A few trees become color; their neon leaves forming a giant mass of a single hue. Throughout Chicago, the colors are a random confetti. Leaf edges burn, the color bleeding inward until the entire thing flashes red. And then falls. The young oak outside of my living room window crisped up around August and went straight from green to ashy brown. The color drained long ago, but even now the leaves are holding on. Shivering in the wind. Just like me.

This is the time of year when the trees outsmart us. These beautiful giants, usually so slow to change, can’t keep still. Leaves fly and fall and crunch. Shadows stretch. The sun sets. It all feels so quick, and one day you look up and it’s suddenly winter.

But not yet. For now, at least for a little while, we still have color.