Spring is, uh, springing, and everyone seems to be in a good mood. Holling places pots of crocuses on tables and chats cheerfully with Ruth-Anne as The Brick offers up free egg breakfasts. Maurice seems to be the only exception, and he’s an absolute jerkass about it, even for Maurice. When Holling offers to freshen up his coffee, he rants about how he’s tired of that same old swill before storming off.

[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music.]

Chris is sniffling on the airwaves due to seasonal allergies, but he only sees this as confirmation of the budding season. It’s like when his uncle’s arthritic knee predicts the rain. There’s not much other news in Cicely, aside from the reminder that bears were waking up from hibernation so people need to keep their trash cans covered. Maurice comes in and chides Chris for subjecting listeners to his gross mucous sounds and for playing the same old music that he’s tired of (despite it being a new record).

Shelly visits Dr. Fleischman for a weird rash on her hands, though she seems more concerned with her French nails and with Slash debasing his status as a rocker by performing with Michael Jackson. The doctor diagnosis her with contact dermatitis from washing dishes.

Maggie finds out that a woman she went to high school with has recently had a baby. A boy. And somewhere in there she got married, too. “I wonder where she met him,” muses Maggie. “Probably in the delivery room,” says Ed.

Dr. Fleischman walks into his office to find a man looking through his books. It’s Leonard (played by the wonderful Graham Greene, may he rest in peace), Marilyn’s cousin. As a healer of 30 years, he’s having a sort of mid-career crisis. He’s a very traditional healer who wants to experience “alternative” medicine. So he’s here to see how Dr. Fleischman does his thing. Fleischman begrudgingly agrees (apparently he said yes to this idea to Marilyn a while back), though he warns Leonard his practice there might not be too helpful because it’s boring.

Maggie hears a clatter of trash cans, but when she goes outside with a gun, she doesn’t see the culprit. Later, when her truck gets stuck in the mud outside of town, a mysterious man steps out of the woods and helps her out. He’s large, quiet, and sweater clad. As she drives off, she looks into her rearview mirror to see him walk back into the woods.

Far from getting better, Shelly’s condition worsens in phases. First, her skin becomes overly sensitive. Then she wakes up red and peely all over. She goes back to Dr. Fleischman, who is now being shadowed by Leonard. In contrast to Joel’s professional detachment and down-to-business attitude, Leonard seems to waste time with unrelated small talk. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this annoys the doctor. He gives her some cortisol cream and rebuffs Leonard’s continuous attempts to find out trivial details about Shelly.

Maurice goes into Ruth-Anne’s for some new aftershave. Old Spice just isn’t cutting it anymore. As a cage full of baby chickens cheeps away in the background, Maurice tells Ruth-Anne he loved USMC boot camp at Parris Island. They shaved your head, wore you down, and made something new of you. “The trouble is,” he laments, “I’m too old for boot camp.”

Maggie hears another clatter outside her cabin, but when she goes outside, gun in hand, she sees the mysterious woodsman. She explains that she normally doesn’t greet people that way, but there’s been a bear around. He says maybe the bear wanted food… or maybe he wanted to see her. He flirts with her but ultimately declines her invitation to come in, leaving as mysteriously as he came.

Shelly goes back to the doctor’s, but he’s out on a house call. So she sits and talks with Leonard for a while. She says Holling’s been obsessed with eggs lately, but she doesn’t care for them. She tells him a childhood story about her Aunt Marge giving her an egg to care for so it would hatch. She carried it around for a while, but it never happened. When she finally opened it, she found a dead chick inside. As sad as this made her, she was at least relieved her Aunt Marge wasn’t crazy. Leonard thinks there’s something to this egg business. Shelly must be hatching from her shell, not unlike a snake shedding its skin. This is rebirth.

Maggie goes to the woods again and finds Arthur catching fish–by hand! “My mother taught me,” he says. He takes her to his home (a cave across the river). There, they drink mead, eat berries, talk, and dance. I guess it’s kind of romantic for a date in a cave. Arthur says some weird stuff, like that his father lives “in the mountains” and that his mother was shot. He also says he’s seen Maggie before, “In the sky,” and he knew he wanted her in his life.

Maurice has Ed over for spring cleaning. This year he’s doing it Marie Kondo style, digging through the attic and telling Ed to toss just about everything. That is, until Ed finds a kilt which had belonged to his grandfather. They also find his old tobacco pipe and his bagpipes. Maurice gets wistful as he reminisces about his veteran grandfather (a Royal Highlander) who, after the war, settled on a farm in Oklahoma. Maurice remembers summer evenings and the smell of his cherry tobacco and the sound of bagpipes on the still, warm night air. “Toss ’em?” Ed asks.

Joel is displeased with Leonard seeing one of his patients, and furthermore with him telling her that her skin condition was her being reborn. Leonard reminds him that nothing in medicine is certain and that providing comfort and doing no harm is mostly what they do. Oh, and he tells Joel that the reason he’s so bored with his work in Cicely is that he’s boring. Then he leaves.

Chris tends to some eggs in an incubator as he muses about bears, death, and rebirth.

At The Brick, Joel sees crocuses blooming, a cheerful Holling still slinging eggs, and that Shelly is all better. He goes to Marilyn’s to see Leonard. There, he admits he was never very good with patients, but relates a med school story in which by chatting with a man with a mystery illness, Joel learned he had been fishing in Cortez, and so he was able to deduce that it was an amoebic infection. If not quite an apology, this is Joel at least admitting to some validity in Leonard’s chatty, time-consuming methods.

Maggie goes back to Arthur’s cave, only to find it empty but for a bear. “Arthur?” she asks, as it runs off into the woods.

Chris pets a newly-hatched chick while philosophizing and telling prison stories. Maggie sits alone by the river. Holling and Shelly share a bubble bath. Marilyn scatters seeds in her garden. Joel smiles and chats with a patient. And Maurice, having learned to embrace the old, plays his grandfather’s bagpipes.

Copyright 1992? Symbol of new life or not, that chicken is long dead. That’s depressing.

Miscellaneous notes, quotes, and anecdotes:

– For at least the second time in the series so far, Dwight Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs plays at The Brick. It was apparently the go-to song at redneck dives in the 90s.

– Fun Shelly Earrings Alert!: Frying pans with eggs! Lobsters! Chili peppers! The blue vinyl records come back. Also a pair I can’t make out.

– Joel doesn’t remember agreeing to being shadowed by Leonard, but Marilyn insists he did. “I asked you when you were playing Gameboy… You said yes.”

– The makeup people did a great job of making Chris look awful this episode.

– I believe a commenter brought this up early on, but I think Ed’s Uncle Anku was basically replaced by Leonard after Graham Greene’s rise to stardom thanks to Dances With Wolves.

– Damn, he was good in that too.

– Leonard’s comments about medicine being mostly comfort and placebo is reminiscent of a conversation Joel had with Anku.

– Maurice loved boot camp? What a weirdo.

– Maggie invites Arthur in for a can of soup. I love this very subtle running gag.

– If Arthur looks or sounds vaguely familiar (and vaguely unsettling), it’s probably because you know him from Die Hard.

– Ed wears his Neil Young shirt again.

– I wish I hadn’t had the bear thing spoiled for me before watching the episode. I wonder when I would have figured it out.