Tiny green shoots have emerged from the depths of my favorite swamp.

They remind me of the whiffle haircuts I received alongside my seven brothers as a child (that’s right, seven). We’d each take a turn on the tallest stool in the house wrapped in a black trash bag, with small heads bared to the clippers. By the time the last boy received his whiffle, the floor would be covered in trimmings. There was only one shower in the house, and a line of itchy, irritated kids would quickly form in the stairwell if anyone took their time.

I’m reminded of those haircuts not just because my head resembled the swamp plants, but because those haircuts were harbingers of warming weather. Locks grew long in the winter. Whiffle haircuts meant spring had arrived.

Spring has indeed arrived — and not just as a date on the calendar (we all know springtime in New England doesn’t always mean warmer weather).

As I write this, I am sitting in a particularly sunny patch on my deck. A sparrow just ran beneath my chair. There’s a woodpecker in the nearby trees hammering away at a hardwood. Birdsong is alive in the air and there’s a warm breeze running through my hair with a sensation reminiscent of those I recall feeling while on the porch shaking the post-whiffle trimmings off my shirt.

Of course, a lot has changed since then. These days, I cut my own hair (a hold-over ritual from my military days) or, if I’m feeling lazy, I’ll pay a barber for a trim. Other things haven’t changed.

The trail along which I noticed those young green shoots, for example, is more or less the same as I remember it from my days of childhood. The footpath follows the same route I fondly recall through the lens of nostalgia. It leads past trees that I recognize and over hills I’ve trekked many times before. The woodpeckers and squirrels and occasional black bears I wander past (from afar) are familiar.

In times like these, when the world at times feels like it’s shifting beneath the feet, I’m grateful for that trail and all the memories it holds.

Andy Castillo is the features editor at the Greenfield Recorder. He can be reached at acastillo@recorder.com.