Spring Cacophony

Spring is such a raucous season. Unfolding from winter’s relative quiet, spring opens with the musical call of peepers from just-thawed ponds and the varied songs of birds returning, the noise building to an impressive crescendo that ebbs and grows throughout each day.

Last weekend I escaped to the front porch for a few stolen moments of solitary peace. Only they weren’t solitary – or peaceful, really. All around me there was noise and movement. A catbird meow-called from the highbush cranberry in the front yard. The whir of wings revealed a hummingbird was exploring the flowers in the planters on the upstairs porch railing. The piercing screech of a hawk drew my eyes upward, where two raptors spun circles far, far above. They seemed too high to be hunting; just playing on the breeze.  

On short evening rambles with the dog, as most birdsong quiets with the approach of darkness, we hear the beautifully melancholic trilling of the hermit thrush from the woods. The peepers are just warming up then, testing out their voices for another night of singing for love – or at least reproductive prospects. By the time I am in bed, with the windows open to the welcome warmth of the spring night, the singing of these tiny frogs is a boisterous, chiming cacophony, one of the wonders of nature that amazes me no matter how many times I hear it.

The robins lead the chorus that awakens me on spring mornings with their rambling, cheery singing. A varied choir of other birds joins in: the question-and-answer of the red-eyed vireo, the ovenbird’s somewhat screechy “teacher-teacher-teacher,” and the white-throated sparrow singing, “Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.” There are song sparrows and goldfinches, phoebes and slate juncos – and the chickadees and nuthatches who’ve stayed with us all year. It seems impossible that one yard contains such a variety of birds – and birdsong – and I’m sure I’ll never learn them all. That kind of noise is nice, anyway, whether or not I know – or see – who’s making it.

Not all the twittering happens from tree branches or the pond, of course. Tom turkeys gobble as they make their way along the paths through the back field. A gang of crows yell their caw-caws at a red fox as he meanders through the yard in the early morning, patrolling the invisible borders of his territory before trotting off to some quieter spot.

Amid all of this noisy nature, we humans contribute to the sounds of spring, too. The drone of lawnmowers returns to yards everywhere. Bicyclists call to each other as they ride past in spandex-clad pairs. The hum of sporadic traffic drifts through open windows. And if there is a baseball game at the school two miles down the road, the cheers drift into our yard, and I pause to silently root for the home team.

Even the appearance of spring, once the season really gets going, is a bit noisy. The grass, finally, turns a bright, lush green. Leaves unfurl on trees. New vegetation pushes through last year’s dieback in the field, and lupine leaves grow higher and fuller, moving toward the plants’ burst of color – coming soon. The apples trees are blooming now, all white and pink, and the buds on the lilacs are opening into a cascade of purple and the sweet scent of almost-summer.

These pastel hues will build toward summer’s audacity of color, when a cacophony of blooms bursts forth from the gardens and fields. By then, the peepers will have quieted and the birdsong will have started its slow fade, as birds move from attracting mates and establishing territories to hatching and feeding broods of chicks. (Who has time to sing when the kids are demanding food all day long?)

But now, in these days of approaching summer, when winter has really and truly faded into a cold and provisional memory, the sounds of spring rouse me from sleep in the welcome brightness of early morning. All the noise and color draw me into this season, growing from the last, rolling into the next. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the May 27, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Indecisive March

March is such an indecisive month. I think whoever coined the phrase, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute,” must have done so in March. What other month can bring near-summer temperatures, mid-winter snow squalls, rain storms, thunder claps, and sunny blue skies all in one week?

Snow crocus

Even after such a weird-weather winter, this month has been intensely unpredictable.

The crocuses bloomed last week, the earliest I can remember them opening to the warming sun. And our first robins of the year flew into the yard weeks before their normal arrival date. We’ve had more birds at the feeder than ever before: chickadees and blue jays, nuthatches and woodpeckers, goldfinches and purple finches.

I’m loath to bring the feeder in with so much color and activity there, but I’m sure by now the bears are about, and I’d rather keep them out of the sandbox, which is next to the bird feeder. My kids rediscovered that sandbox last week. It’s been there all winter with hardly a skim of ice, but suddenly, with warmer weather, it was the new hot spot.

Maybe the sandbox is just better in shorts and t-shirts. And that’s what the kids were wearing, casting off their more practical mid-March outfits and digging into the summer clothes as soon as they’d walked in the door from school and dropped their backpacks.

My littlest one even asked for bug spray. I’m not sure if the bugs were actually in the sandbox with her or the request was just an innate response to wearing shorts. Regardless, the kids spent hours in the sand, making some combination of mud-sand whoopee pies and cookies and cakes, digging tunnels, getting thoroughly, happily dirty. It’s the most peacefully the three of them have played – I don’t know, maybe ever. As soon as dinner was in their bellies, back out they went until the dark crept in, later now that we’ve changed the clocks.

The next day dawned sunny and warmish, moved to a sky clustered with thunderheads, and ended with cold and wet. And then it snowed. Back out came the extra layers for skiing over the weekend, the neck warmers and thick fleece shirts. Flip-flops, still covered in sand, were chucked once more into the depths of the closet and replaced again by snow boots.

Yes, we are in that familiar March place, where we might ski or bike or walk along the beach at Echo Lake. Maybe all three in one day. The extended forecast calls for a continued mixed bag of sunshine, rain, snow, warmth and chilliness, sometimes all in the same day.

So, I’ll hold off washing up and packing away the winter gear for a while longer, at least until mid-April. March is such an indecisive month. You never know what’s coming next, and it’s best to be prepared – for a little bit of everything.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 25, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Winter Hardy

I’ve brushed a new layer of fluff off the windshield just about every morning for the past two weeks. My husband has taken to dropping the plow nearly each trip into or out of the driveway, scraping away the snow that has fallen since the truck’s last passage. I’ve lost track of the number of days that have started off with temperatures well below zero and barely warmed.

It’s Winter, all right, and it looks like she’s settled in, which is just fine by me.

It takes a good dose of New England hardiness to survive a winter like this. At least to survive it with some sense of good cheer. There is shoveling and roof clearing and endless plowing and firewood carrying. If you’re lucky (and smart) there is also skiing and snowshoeing and ice skating and sledding and snow fort building. My kids (and I, too) lamented the December rain and the loss of white from our landscape. Cold and brown is no good for a winter-loving soul. Cold and snow is an entirely different, and much happier, thing.

It seems while we head into the white looking for fun, many animals – the hardiest of New Englanders – have hunkered down since the deep snowfall. A few weeks ago our fields were laced with deer tracks and the hopping marks of red squirrels and the canine paw prints of coyotes, along with fox and the elusive bobcat. Lately, however, when I strap on the cross-country skis for a mind-clearing trek through the field and woods, I see far fewer tracks. A solitary deer trail emerging from the trees here, a snowshoe hare track bounding across the path there. The garden compost heap, which had been visited regularly by a bold doe, has been left alone for days, except by the crows.

On the coldest days, even the ever-cheery chickadees wait until well after I’ve had my own breakfast to visit the feeder. A pair of blue jays often sit puffed against the chill on bare branches nearby, their brightness almost startling against a backdrop of white. The other day a barred owl perched atop a dead birch tree in the field, head turning methodically in search of a meal, feathers ruffled by the wind. Eventually the owl gave up and flew away; there were no small rodents moving through the deep snow below.

The only animal who seems unbothered by the cold and deepening snow is the porcupine, whose trough-like trail through the woods crosses the human-made path of snowshoes and skis just where it has the past few winters. Scraping teeth marks appear like brush strokes across several smallish yellow birch trees along the trail, revealing where the porcupines ate the inner bark, a favorite winter meal.

I know there are plenty of people who hunker down, too, closed up in their warm houses waiting for spring through the long northern winter. And there are others whose children have had far too many snow days (while here we’ve had zero snow days and still plenty of snow), wreaking havoc on the already complicated logistics of family schedules. In Boston and other cities, they are running out of places to put all the snow; commuting is an ongoing nightmare, and this winter is a multifaceted headache there.

Here, it is just winter, to be endured or enjoyed, depending on your perspective. Sure, plowing and shoveling become tiresome when they are daily chores, but all that pushed-up snow makes a great foundation for a snow fort. Frigid temperatures can certainly wear a person down after a while, but that cold makes the cocoa all the better. Driving through snow is not much fun, but skiing in it is pure, invigorating bliss.

In mid-February, the days are noticeably longer than a few weeks ago. To some, that means spring is coming. To the rest of us, it means more daylight for basking in Winter’s white glow.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the February 13, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.