Overwhelmed By Spring
One rainy spring night driving home from the farm I had to pull over. I thought that my 2012 Honda CRV had finally given up on me. There was a loud chirping noise surrounding me and images of fleeing the car with my belongings as it caught fire flooded my mind. As I slowed the sound only grew louder and my anxiety increased. I came to a stop and instantly started laughing as I rolled the window down to better hear the chorus of spring peepers coming from all around. They were back! I turned off the car and immersed myself in the joyous sound of these wonderful frogs for a few serene minutes.
The songs and signs of spring are not things I have experienced for nearly 10 years. Well maybe that’s not true but the seasonal transitions in California, where I had been living, are very different. Everything is green over the winter, in a good year there is more than enough water to go around but then spring comes and things start drying up as the rain becomes sparse. Summer is brown and gray as the fog sits heavy on the coast and tourists find themselves underdressed for the blustery summer weather. And just as the summer visitors give up on the sun and head home, the fall begins and the fog gives way to blue skies. Fall was always my favorite season there as the beaches emptied and our tiny California coastal town quieted back down.
This spring in Maine has brought with it a boom of color that is almost too intense for my winter weary eyes. I’ve found myself distractedly driving not because of any beeping or whirring device but because of the green, pink, red, purple and yellow that has suddenly appeared. Every morning brings more and more birdsong and the sweet tunes of the icecream truck are back to being a regular sound in the neighborhood chorus. Spring has brought on an unfamiliar sense of anticipation and anxiety. Unlike the slow days of winter, now there are more things to do than the ever lengthening sunlight allows. I wish to surf, mountainbike, hike, and weed garden beds all at once all while simultaneously reading and writing and baking at the same pace I did this winter. There are chicken houses to be built and farmers markets to prepare for and who could forget about all the miners lettuce there is to harvest and eat. An explosion of activity I was once looking forward to now feels daunting and unachievable. I am grappling with the idea that I might not be able to do everything all the time and it is a hard but necessary lesson to learn as I make a home here in Maine, a place so shaped by its seasons.
I am sure that this will be a spring and summer of acclimation, it already has been, and I am excited to see what else I learn along the way. For now I will surf when there are waves, eat all the miners lettuce I can get my hands on, and pause to listen to the peepers whenever I need a reminder to slow back down and enjoy the season of now.
This Beltaine poem by farm owner and friend Holly Morrison does a wonderful job of welcoming in the new season and all the feelings that accompany it.
Bealtuinn
Beyond the edge of my vision,
There are people who give their breath
And their fire to warm the world.
Somewhere down the road,
There are people who love and serve
Others unstintingly, stitching the ragged
Edges of others' lives.
I want to be one of them.
Yet, just now, the apple trees are
Unfurling their tiny green fists
While late spring snowflakes flirt
And dance among them.
Just now, I need to be here,
A witness to this wonderful thing.
--Holly Morrison
