A Walk Around a Spring Day

wander through my camera roll with me and see how spring takes its time coming to Maine

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There’s when the calendar tells you it’s spring…And there’s when the natural world tells you it’s spring!

Spring here on the Maine homestead begins rainy and chilly and sort of alternating. A few days hinting at springtime, a quick throwback to a winter weekend.

But then one day, you can really feel the difference. The sun powers up and holds the clouds at bay for several days in a row. The air accepts its fate and settles warm and gentle, no longer whistling one last wisp of winter in on a northern breeze.

But way up north here, spring is a slow-moving event. In my mind, springtime is all bright blossoms and a world turned green again. But actually our forest is still a blend of evergreens and pale bare branches. Here, we haven’t yet reached the “greening” stage - we are still at “pinking.”

Because before a single leaf opens on a single tree, the maples bloom. The regal branches of those towering giants explode into their annual display of improbably fuzzy maple-poms.

And I sort of forget this one thing every year, and have to be reminded again, and have to pause to be quietly baffled. Because all of our maples are Red Maples. And most of them bloom red….

But a few are orange, instead…

And just this one, right outside our front door, is bright lemon yellow!

The maple bloom is really the beginning of a spring that feels like spring. It’s when the maples bloom that the first early flutterings of the butterflies begin, bright lavender Spring Azures and coppery Eastern Commas.

The giant native bumblebee queens drowse out of hibernation and bumble about the mossy floor, nosing out the perfect spot to build a new colony. The mosquito larvae wiggle in the vernal pools where the frogs sing. The humming vibration of waking life is rising all around, and where you can’t hear it, you can juuuuuust feel it in the tips of your fingers and the center of your spirit.

The birds are visiting two-by-two, except for the chickadees, who can never go anywhere except in a messy cheerful gaggle. Two Blue Jays, two Eastern Phoebes, two American Goldfinches, two Chipping Sparrows…

And two White-throated Sparrows! A white-morph lady has paired up sensibly with a tan-morph gentleman, and I hope they will find a perfect spot nearby to build their nest and sing their songs.

I’m making some gender assumptions here - but for some really interesting reasons, which I explored last year in Getting to Know Eyebrows, they do often pair up in this way!

It’s a funny little interlude, because buds are beginning to form, and these few brave early risers are nosing their way back into the world, but it’s still sort of pre-spring. Spring prep. Spring training. It will be a few more weeks before the leaves are really leaf-ing and the bees are really bee-ing and world fills up to overflowing with blossoms.

Things that happen in the pre-season can move fast! The crocus have already come…and gone!

Our sweet new willow neighbor has entered its improbably-fluffy-explosion era, inspired, I suppose, by the maples showing off all around.

The garter snakes, having timed their activities perfectly to the very first warm days, have already completed their generational responsibilities. They are now free to alternate between hunting and lounging, and any drowsy-warm day means watching your step on the mossy paths, where a garter snake will always find the coziest spot of sunshine in a dappled forest.

And the squirrel, well, you know how squirrels are. In every season, she is a constant, bold and sassy, busy and fluffy, endlessly hungry and unfailingly adorable, and always too feisty to admit she’s flattered that I think so.

And so, in the midst of rushing from one family activity to another, with all of that same new spring energy that is animating the natural world all around me, I stop to smell the hyacinths. I stop to baby-talk the tiny leaves that are just beginning to emerge. I stop to notice just how quickly all the tiny lives are moving all around me, each of us a streaming blur passing at preoccupied speed on the highway of life.

And I also stop (because who can resist?) to take a few pictures with my phone, and marvel over the little silly intricacies and beauties and wonders, and package them up with a few words to share springtime in Maine, from my backyard to you!

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p.s. I am excited to announce Bird Silhouettes, a new series of nature-inspired tees, now available on my Etsy shop!