Spring

In Grundy, spring arrives not as a gentle season but as a sudden release of winter’s pressure: ice melts, branches spring back, flowers appear, and residents return to town with an appetite for the things they have gone without. For Mo Duvall-Wenstein, that abrupt thaw also marks a contrast with the spring she knew in Mississippi and the uneasy change in Grundy’s relationship with its visitors. The season renews the landscape, but it does not restore the town to an uncomplicated calm.

A Different Kind of Spring

In April, Mo imagines the Mississippi she left behind as already green and oppressively humid. Daffodils would be scattered across the small patch of grass she called a yard; she would be in shorts and sandals, preparing for the Reynolds family’s annual Easter weekend barbecue. This familiar calendar offers a measure of the life she has exchanged for Grundy’s northern climate. Her old spring means warmth, domestic routine, and an established social gathering. In Grundy, late winter only gives way to what passes for spring, and the season announces itself through physical changes in ice and water rather than through a predictable arrival of heat.

The difference is more than a contrast between climates. Mo recognizes the pattern of sudden flowering from home, where dogwoods and redbuds came into bloom among trees that had barely begun to turn green. Grundy’s roadside flowers are different in color and texture: delicate yellow poppies and vivid purple irises grow wild along the roads. The familiar rhythm of a landscape coming alive remains, but its particulars make Mo’s new surroundings unmistakable. Spring gives her a point of comparison without making the two places interchangeable.

The Thaw

One morning, Mo notices an icicle dripping from her front porch. The small sign of melting becomes part of a larger release: water rushes as the earth seems to wake and flex, while tree limbs freed from a season’s burden of ice snap upward into power lines. The outages that follow are brief; none lasts long enough for residents to bother starting their generators. Spring is therefore visible not only in flowers but in the consequences of winter loosening its hold. The same thaw that clears the branches also makes the town’s electrical lines vulnerable.

The change in weather transforms local behavior almost as quickly as it transforms the landscape. Grundy’s residents become exuberant during the so-called heat wave, and neighbors who had been away flood back into town. Shelves at The Blue Glacier are stripped of everything. Mo likens the rush to people who have subsisted on gruel through the winter and now cannot wait to gorge themselves on Cap’n Crunch and Cheez-Its. The comic excess of the image gives the thaw a social dimension: spring means not just survival through the cold, but the sudden return of appetite, movement, and company.

Visitors and the Wolf Story

The return of activity coincides with a shift in Grundy’s appeal to outsiders. Nate Gogan had worried that tourism was flagging, but the story of missing hikers dragged into the woods and never found gives the town a new attraction for people drawn by morbid curiosity. Spring’s reopened landscape becomes a destination, though not everyone arriving is interested in it as a place to walk or observe. Some outsiders enter the woods carrying illegal, powerful weapons in hopes of taking home a trophy.

At The Blue Glacier, hikers demand stories about the so-called monster wolf and directions to the attack site. Alan Dahling spends more time protecting people from their own dangerous ambitions than searching for the wolf. The thaw thus brings a double movement: Grundy’s own people return to ordinary pleasures, while visitors arrive to pursue a manufactured thrill around real disappearances. Mo says she finally understands the locals’ hostility toward tourists. The season’s new accessibility does not simply open the woods; it exposes how easily a community’s danger can be turned into entertainment.

Seasonal Time and Change

Mo’s thoughts about spring also reach beyond the immediate thaw. In winter, she had sent Kara Reynolds photographs of the first measurable snow, including one of herself grinning in a waist-deep drift. Cooper Graham took the photograph. Kara quickly began planning a visit for the spring thaw, and Mo suspects that the pictures of Cooper, more than a powerful desire to see her, helped prompt the plan. Kara’s email subject line, “Do they all look like that?”, turns the seasonal visit into a wry reminder that Mo’s connections to home persist even as her life in Grundy changes.

Across these moments, spring is measured through anticipation as much as through weather: a visit planned for the thaw, an icicle finally dripping, neighbors coming back, and roadsides breaking into color. Yet renewal does not erase what the winter and its dangers have brought into view. The hikers’ disappearance continues to shape the town’s reputation, and the returning visitors make that reputation newly consequential. Spring in Grundy restores motion and abundance, but it also reveals the costs of being seen through the story outsiders want to believe.