Do you hear it? You can't help but love it.

You probably heard it yesterday. Not the silence that enveloped your lake as March advanced, the snowmobile season wound down, the ice anglers' shanties gone, the lake an empty expanse of white. Not the faint sounds of life, the scratch of a nuthatch on oak bark, the distant percussion of a woodpecker, the woods slowly waking.

No, this was even better -- snow melt water raining down on your deck. Winter had held on, without mercy, barely an hour above freezing since, say, the end of December. Yesterday the temperature topped 50 degrees, and the melting began in earnest. At five o'clock in went  to the lower deck to grill supper, getting a minor shower of roof runoff as I stepped out the door, taking refuge under the screen porch.

I could hear nothing except the loud splatter of large drops on the lower deck boards, the upper deck's much-oversized foccacia loaf of snow turning at last to water, shrinking. Out on Birch Lake, the snow's surface, lit by a low sun, bore a stippled texture, a sure sign of melting (though two feet of snow and 18 inches of ice will take a while to go away).

I lit a charcoal fire, let it burn down, then placed six bratwursts on the grill and sat on one of two stacks of pier boards, stowed under the porch last fall. It was wondrous, on the third-to-last day of March, to sit without a coat and grill supper, fully comfortable, the white smoke rising through the lid vents scenting the air with summer.

It won't be long before I'm down at the lake, knee deep, assembling metallic pier sections in erector-set style. Soon I'll be toting these wooden pier sections, two at a time, down the stairs to lay in place on the frame.

It was a hopeful thought, but no match for the sensation of water splatting down on wood, not in bashful, now-and-then drips, but in a cascade -- abundant, persistent. It was a beautiful sound. I hope you heard it, too.