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.

Flamboyant Summer

It is probably because a full one-half of the northern New England year is devoid of most color that I crave the flamboyance of summer.

From the time the last leaf blows away in mid-October until the first brave blooms poke through the cold ground in April, the landscape’s palette is constrained to dull browns, gold grays, and stark white. I love winter and snow. But by the time I turn the calendar to April’s page, when I’ve had my fill of skiing and every roar of the furnace coming to life causes me to groan inwardly, it seems impossible that the world beyond the windows will ever move from cold, bleak hues to the fullness and heat of summer colors.

I am not the only one who misses the color and rejoices at its return. Before the snow has entirely disappeared from every shady crevice in the yard, many of us are potting hardy pansies to place by the door, selecting the season’s seeds, and plotting the colors we will bring to our porches and gardens, just as soon as the sun is warm enough and the days long enough.

Several years ago, on my way to work each day, I passed a somewhat shabby house. The clapboards could have used a fresh coat of paint, and even the surrounding neighborhood seemed tired. Come summer, though, the little house came alive, its porch bursting with countless hues as flowers spilled from hanging baskets and planters on the steps, any blemishes camouflaged now by the myriad of blossoms.

So many houses, from the grandest to the humblest, are transformed by flowers in the warmest months. So many of us spend a good bit of cash and countless hours planting and weeding and looking after the plants. We tend perennial beds and marvel as the dull, tired, stick-like stalks cut down last autumn swell into voluptuous vegetation and bright blooms. We fill window boxes and porch planters and hanging baskets with color and foliage and fullness. We cut back the smiling pansies when they get too leggy and deadhead the petunias, hoping to coax them into blooming well past midsummer and toward fall.

Downtown planters cascade from light posts, overflowing with buoyant blossoms. Bridge railings are draped in flower boxes, with spikes of color reaching upward and sprays of ivy flowing down. Businesses brighten windows with lively geraniums and cheerful impatiens and trailing vines imbued with color.

At my home, the crocuses come first, then the daffodils, their bright pastels in the still-chilly air heralding the return of color. Antique lilac bushes bloom purple and sweet-smelling along the driveway in late May, preceding the pink-tinged white of apple blossoms humming with bees. The lupines arrive in June to fill the fields with purple and indigo and the occasional pink. Through the rest of the summer, wildflowers pop up among the fields’ tall grasses, some familiar, others surprising us with their blooms. Big, orange lilies grow tall outside the kitchen window, where small jars of flowers – wild and cultivated – stand through the summer above the kitchen sink.

Our front porch holds a small pot of pansies and a large planter of mixed blooms. Last year I added window boxes to the upstairs railing, filling them with vining petunias and bright snapdragons, adding a bit of color higher than any ground-dwelling plant can reach.

The perennial garden out front opens with purple, as the flag irises unfold in the early days of summer. The garden marches on to orange-yellow day lilies, wispy pink astilbes, and subtle green lady’s mantle. Later there will be gold-and-brown rudbeckia, pink sedum, and the tall, yellow, late-blooming stalks my mother calls outhouse flowers (because they grow high enough to obscure a privy).

In the heat of summer, I try to appreciate each bloom, every peony pop and burst of bee balm, the brightness of begonias and zestiness of zinnias, lacy-full globes of hydrangea and nodding sunflowers heavy with sunshine. I store some of that happy glow of color in the summer-loving corner of my soul, saving a bit of the brightness for those cold days to come, so that I can remember in the absence of color that winter’s severity will – eventually – blossom into summer’s welcome flamboyance.  

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 July 25, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

Changing pace

The merit of changing life’s pace hit me several summers ago, when I spent a few afternoons each week working as a docent at The Frost Place in Franconia. I’ve always enjoyed stopping to smell the roses – both figuratively and literally – but I had recently entered into a new stage of my life, one that involved two babies and plenty of hectic.

Five months earlier, I had become the mother of twins. After several years as a small-town newspaper reporter, with a finger on the pulse of the local communities and a schedule as unpredictable as the news, I was immersed in a new reality of relatively sleepless nights and baby talk, dirty diapers and midnight feedings, caring for two little beings when I’d only really ever had to take care of myself. I’d started doing a little writing from home, but getting out of the house – by myself – was emancipating.

Some days at the farmhouse just down the road and around the bend, where the poet Robert Frost lived nearly 100 years ago, were busy with visitors. Others were quiet, and I would be left alone with poems to read and a couple acres of semi-tamed field and forest and garden to explore. I began noticing wildflowers I’d maybe seen before but never really looked at closely, finding monarch caterpillars munching leaves in a thick stand of milkweed (and, later, their chrysalises, then emerging butterflies), trying to identify the array of birdsong floating through the air and creating its own form of poetry.

One of the books in our small shop in Frost’s former barn – the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to New England – became my go-to source for information on my new discoveries. At summer’s end, the Dartmouth College intern with whom I had shared docent duties presented the book to me as a parting gift.

The two children who were babies that summer are now 5-year-olds and have a little sister. We look at the book together often, revisiting familiar information and searching its pages to find the new plants and animals we’ve seen or heard. It’s fitting that the book came from a place where Frost lived, as the poet reportedly loved wandering through the local landscape, botanizing all the way.

Life certainly hasn’t become any less hectic since that summer at The Frost Place, with a growing work load of writing projects and three active kids. But as much as life becomes busier with children, it also grows more inquisitive. “Why?” and “How?” are favorite questions, asked endlessly, and we alter the pace of our lives to allow for discovery.

We wander through the fields and forests around our house often, in all kinds of weather, in every season. Moving at a child’s pace, I notice more than I would if I were running or cross-country skiing or biking solo. Looking at the landscape from a child’s perspective becomes a learning experience for all of us.

As we slow down we discover endless wonderful things: the petals of trout lilies curl backwards toward the sunlight, the white springtime blossoms of wood anemones are tinted pink on their backsides, the flowers of the small purple violets growing wild in the woods are shaped like butterflies.

In the spring we listen for the peepers calling from the nearby pond and creep as quietly as we can to the water’s edge; it is never quietly enough to catch one of the tiny frogs in the act of singing. In summer we watch the lupine plants grow higher each week until they burst in purple spikes that fill the back field, and we know where the best stashes of wild blackberries are. In fall, we look for signs of bear along the trail that meanders through the old apple orchard. The tracks through new snow in winter tell us which animals have passed by recently, and we can tell where the red squirrels like to eat by the deep piles of pinecone scales beneath tall trees.

We still get caught up in the craziness of school and meetings, t-ball and swimming lessons, paying the bills and buying the groceries and tending to the endless piles of laundry. But we take the time, especially when things get crazy, to change pace. Change is good, so the saying goes; variety is the spice of life.

A version of this essay appears in this week’s Record-Littleton.