Spring Fever

Around this time each year, I start to get excited for spring. I know better: one 60-degree day does not a season make. And I love winter – I do! But it’s hard to not look forward to green grass and pretty crocus blooms when the sun is out – and the driveway is a mess of sinking mud and melting ice.

At each seasonal junction, I am thankful to live in a place with four seasons. (I know some people count mud season separately, but there is no slush solstice or mud season equinox.) How fleeting would spring’s fragile blooms seem without the knowledge that sturdier summer blossoms were on the horizon? How could we love the heat of summer so without the promise of crisp fall days to come? How bare would the late autumn trees seem without being able to look forward to winter’s snow-laced mantle?

Now, at this pivotal time, I am cherishing each day on the snow I can get, hoping (futilely, probably) for another few ski-through-the-woods outings with the dog, maybe even one more powder day. But I am also relishing the sun on my face, the warm afternoons when I can open the windows and let fresh air filter in, the mornings when I am comfortable leaving the house in a lightweight vest instead of my long down coat.

It’s around now that I start talking with the kids and with friends about warm-weather adventures: hiking and camping, running the backroads, paddling kayaks along the water. Often, these conversations happen as we drive toward the ski area or ride the chairlift. That seems less like irony to me than faith in the world continuing to spin from one season to the next.

You see, I’m not wishing days away, lamenting the cold and snow as I long for the next season. After as many trips around the sun as I’ve had – all of them in places with distinct, if sometimes slow-to-arrive seasons – I’ve learned (usually, at least) to accept whatever the weather presents and try to dress accordingly.

New England weather is, after all, notoriously mercurial – and getting more so, it seems, all the time. So while the calendar says the new season arrived this week, I know that winter, or at least wintery weather, can – and likely will – return before spring really settles in. I’ve seen snowstorms in May, including one Memorial Day weekend when the kids were able to make a snowman in the front yard – then came inside to eat ice cream cones in front of the fire.

And that’s OK. Part of living here is rolling with that wacky weather. I’m more likely to be upset about a 50-degree day in January than I will be by a 40-degree morning in June.

I know that for the next several weeks, the ski boots will share space with the soccer cleats and the flipflops. The laundry pile will comprise shorts and t-shirts along with long underwear and wool socks. By the time I feel comfortable packing away the down coat, I often just leave it hanging in the closet by the front door, knowing I’ll need it again soon enough.

On these warm new-spring days, when the sun seems to sink more slowly than it has for ages, we – all of us: kids, dogs, grownups – stay outside a bit longer, lingering even in the sinking mud and slushy snowmelt, peeking into the flower bed to see if the crocus leaves are popping up yet. We are not so much eager to push winter behind as we are ready to welcome what comes next – knowing it will all cycle around again. And thankful for it.

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 22, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

Steering through mud season

A friend remarked recently that he’s encountered “frost heaves deep enough to swallow a Hybrid” on local roads. By necessity, I drive a minivan, which is significantly harder to consume than a Prius. But that’s a great bit of imagery, and I think any of us who travels the roads this time of year can relate to the challenge of steering through the potholes and frost heaves of spring, or, as we so fondly call it, Mud Season.

My own road, which turns from rough pavement to narrow dirt one sharp turn before our driveway, is worse this year than I’ve ever seen it. The paved – and I use that term loosely, for there’s more sand and crumbling than pavement at this point – section of the road has decayed to a series of kitchen sink- and bathtub-sized potholes that fill with water and connect to form a virtual minefield for drivers. I’ve accepted that it takes an extra few minutes now to maneuver the half-mile from our house to the state highway at the end of our road.

Even that highway is no guaranteed easy travel route. A few weeks back we had to go the long – and bumpy – route home after a sinkhole large enough to swallow a minivan opened up in the middle of the road. The highway crew got in there and patched it up quickly, but there’s now a wide strip of gravel the breadth of the road where there should be pavement.

Going down the hill from home is out of the question for me. My husband likes the challenge of steering through slippery, gooey troughs of mud bordered on each side by ditches that are easily deep enough to swallow a hybrid or a minivan. But he drives a pickup these days and has the option of 4-wheel drive. I, on the other hand, chauffeur a gaggle of sometimes-rowdy children in a front-wheel drive minivan. I’m leaving the snow tires on until after mud season; I figure I need all the extra traction I can get.

The muddy ruts act like a vortex, sucking cars in so that there’s no exit until the ruts peter out to washboarded gravel. Last year the town road crew, in an effort to make the road passable in mud season, dropped a load of large stones on the two worst sections of the road, which happened to be directly above and just below our driveway. The stones filled in the ruts, alright, but made for an excruciatingly jarring drive. I can’t imagine it was much fun for the guys who dropped them there, either, as they had to dig the stones out to grade the road a month later.

The other morning we woke to a fresh layer of spring snow, just enough white to provide a superficial cover on the road and turn that half-mile stretch into a game of memory: zig hard here, zag gently there, watch out for the dip straight ahead. At least on the road to my daughter’s preschool the frost heaves are obvious. Forget hybrids, these monsters look as if they’ve swallowed a VW bus. The swollen pavement lurches to the right, then swoops to the left – right through a pothole, of course.

I keep thinking I ought to wash my car, but what would be the point? It would just get covered in mud again the next time I left the driveway. Our house is currently surrounded by a mud moat. The kids don’t seem to mind. They’ve hauled the sandbox toys out of the garage and gone to work digging through the top layer of sand – the bottom is still frozen solid. To get to the sandbox – or the garage – they have to traipse through muddy puddles. To get anywhere, they have to traipse through muddy puddles.

And so the house is filled with muddy snow boots, muddy muck boots, muddy snow pants and jackets, and muddy paw prints from the dog. Ah, well. It’s mud season, that time of year where the weather is anything but predictable, and we’re guaranteed our fair share of bumps in the road. Just get out the hose and the broom and make mud pies. After all, black fly and tick season will be here soon enough.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted on her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the April 5, 2013 edition of the Record Littleton.

March Madness

In the American sports world these days there’s lots of talk about brackets and Cinderella teams and number 2 seeds getting taken out by number 16 seeds. But the only seeds I’m thinking of during March Madness this year are the ones that will grow into vegetables.

March crocuses

It’s been 70 degrees or warmer the better part of the last week. In mid-March. In northern New England. Where last year at this time the snow banks along the driveway were still dwarfing the lilac bushes, this week the lilacs are budding. There is no snow on the ground anywhere in sight, except for a wee bit in the deepest rocky crevices of Mount Lafayette and on the high slopes of Cannon Mountain, where a couple months ago they stockpiled manmade snow to last the season.

Well, a week of summer weather means ski season ends this weekend. And I feel as if I should be planting the garden rather than making the final turns of the winter.

March Madness? I’m surrounded by it. In a matter, literally, of minutes we went from ski boots to flip flops, turtlenecks to tank tops, chilly air to freakin’ mosquitoes! There are dandelion greens peeking at us from the yard. The tulips are up six inches and look to be blooming in another week. Continuous warm temperatures mean maple sugaring season was abruptly abbreviated this year, so get ready for the price of maple syrup to skyrocket.

The birds are chirping incessantly. The peepers are singing already. The bears are up. While we haven’t actually seen any bruins, yet, the paths through our yard and fields are littered with their scat. It’s a good reminder to keep the muck boots on when we wander around outside, even though our winter weary toes long for flip flops.

Our mudroom, whose scattered piles are normally indicative of the season, is now a schizophrenic hodgepodge of chaos. (OK, with three small kids, two adults, a long-haired dog who likes to roll around in the mucky field, and two cats thrown in for good measure, our mudroom is normally chaos, just not quite to this extent.) There are snow boots and mud boots, ski pants and sandals, neck gaiters and sunglasses all mixed together in a confusing jumble.

“Mom, do we need mittens?” my kids shout as we head out the door. “Should I wear my snow boots or my rain boots? Or my flip flops?” My smallest one, age 3, went out the other morning in shorts, rain boots, a spring weight fleece jacket, winter hat, mittens, and sunglasses. March Madness, indeed.

The last two afternoons the kids have stripped down to play in a makeshift kiddie pool. Last night they revived one of their favorite pre-bedtime summer rituals: running around the front yard in circles as fast as they can, giggling in a slap-happily the whole time. They came in covered in mud and dirt, got cleaned off, and fell into bed exhausted.

Next week we return to cooler temperatures. Normal March weather, requiring long sleeves and socks. It might even snow a little bit. It won’t surprise me one bit if it snows – a lot – before summer really sets in. Really, we had a taste of winter in October, lots of fall-ish mud season-esque weather through much of the winter, and now summer in March. Why not winter in April? Or May? It’s a good reminder to all those North Country folks who lament snow in winter (hello, it’s WINTER in NEW ENGLAND!) that we don’t get to choose when it happens, but snow is a fact of life here. It’s easy to embrace snow in winter. Snow in late spring, after a taste of summer, not so much.

So, for a while, our mudroom will remain confused, as will the tulips. We’ll leave the bikes on the porch, but the snowshoes are still there, too. And while I’m tempted to sow seeds in my veggie garden, which is completely melted out and warmed by the sun, I think for now I’ll stick to planting seedlings inside, leaving them in the warm, south-facing window of the living room.

It’s a good place for looking out at the March Madness around us.