By STEVEN JUPITER
I once spent a year in San Diego when I was in my early 20s, an experience which probably seems enviable to most people. It was sunny and 75 degrees nearly every day. I wore shorts on my November birthday for the first time in my life. You could pretty much count on “good” weather every single day of the year. You never needed to say “rain or shine” because all it did was shine.
And I hated it.
That probably sounds extremely ungracious. I mean, people move to Southern California from all sorts of gray places specifically for the reliability of the sunshine, so what was wrong with me that I found it annoying? It’s not that I don’t appreciate a beautiful summer day; I just don’t want a year’s worth of beautiful summer days. We need mud season to appreciate everything else.
April is a schizoid month in Vermont. It’s basically still winter, though spring is getting antsy for its turn. One day it’s sunny and warm and the next it’s frigid and snowing. The ground is squishy with snowmelt, the backroads are rutted and impassable. Our shoes are dirty. Our dogs are filthy. We don’t know what to wear from one day to the next.
And I love it.
Every spring in Vermont, mud and all, feels like a triumph: we made it through another winter. We endured the cold, the dark, the snow and ice. We emerge from our hibernation blinking like moles, ready to get back out there and root for grubs, metaphorically speaking.
Warm spring days are precious here. We plan carefully to maximize their output. There’s no time to waste. Hiking, gardening, fishing, or even just enjoying an evening outside with friends and family. Eventually the mosquitos will temper our joy until fall, when we get another brief interlude of carefree outdoor living.
The mud tells us those days are coming. Those isolated mounds of snow that linger in shady parts of the yard will soon be gone. The crocuses are here. Spring peepers entertain us with their croaking cantatas. It’s like a sip of cool water when we’re parched. Or a bowl of great stew when we’re famished. It revives us. It’s life again.
And, paradoxically, that’s probably a good way to explain what was missing in San Diego: the endless summer felt dead. We were zombies passing mindlessly through our lives, never sure what month it was because it just didn’t matter. Nothing happened in June that couldn’t happen in January. It dulled the senses. The stereotype of soft Californians isn’t totally baseless, though I’d wager they’d perk up fast if they had to figure out how to endure a New England winter.
When we moved to Vermont from New York, I thought I understood the seasons. After all, New York has them, too. But in New York, at least in the city, the seasons are simply cues for wardrobe changes. But we moved straight from the city to the woods of Hubbardton, where we kept ducks and chickens and suddenly had to think about winter literally in terms of survival. We had to pay attention to nuances of temperature and weather. We had to keep an eye out for paw prints in the snow around the coop. And the appearance of the mud in the spring signaled relief from those stresses. If we got all the birds through the winter alive, we patted ourselves on the back for a job well done.
So here we are at the tail end of winter/beginning of spring. The mud is upon us, in all possible senses. Soon there will be leaves on the trees again and those first few weeks of green will seem shocking after months of gray and brown. But we will savor those precious months of sunshine because in Vermont they don’t come easy.
Steven Jupiter
