We joke about having five seasons in Maine. And it always gets the attention of folks out of state when we talk about mud season.
But it isn’t always a laughing matter. In my 39th spring since settling in Maine, I still miss spring. Sometimes, spring here hardly lasts long enough to clean the dried glop off your boots after mud time. (Given that I was a turkey farmer for 30 of those years, you can guess that mud is a euphemism for what really got onto my boots.)
Maine and Missouri came yoked into the union, Maine in 1820 as a free state, Missouri in 1821 as slave. I came into Missouri in 1943 as a tagger-along when my parents moved there. I came into Maine in 1980, a would-be farmer (called “hippie” in New Sharon).
In terms of the seasons, the Missouri to Maine trek spins 180 degrees. That came home to me driving home from Lewiston the other day when I saw a young couple in deck chairs on their deck basking in the sun as it slipped into Long Pond at the end of the day.
It had been a beautiful day spent with friends, beginning with the most casual and working my way up to an hour with my best friend. So I was basking in a different sort of glow when I saw those young folks.
And then, it went melancholy because I remembered spring in Kansas City. And I remembered German class at Rockhurst College (now University) when Herr Doktor Rydzel warned the boys — Rockhurst like many Jesuit institutions of the day was all male — to beware the Ides of March.
Several boys in the class were from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, recruited to play baseball for Rockhurst. Dr. Rydzel had grown up in Worcester, which has spring in the same manner as we have spring in Maine. He knew what he was talking about. Nothing is quite like spring in the Midwest. Doktor Rydzel, who died in 2010, said he was still stunned by the beauty of spring in Kansas City, and he had been there for 40 years.
He put into words what “spring fever” means. He was talking not about the turning of a young man’s fancy. He was talking about the temptation to lie under a tree, to yawn and put our heads on our upper arms and roll over every now and again to warm the other side. We might not want to get up to hit the books. I still miss spring.
In my 39 years here, we have had two, three tops, real springs. It must have been 30 years before we got what I might call a Midwestern spring. Now, we’ve had at least one in the past four years, two in the past seven. In April of 2012, I visited my sister in Wisconsin, figuring they always get spring about two weeks before us and that it would be day after day of warm, humid but not stifling air, soft southwest breeze keeping the temperature warm and the humidity on the move. Cow farmers on the land getting ready to plant corn, an occasional swale still muddy.
Instead, I found Wisconsin, for the first time since my sister moved there, behind us for spring. Snow still leaned against the north sides of barns. No corn stubble turned under. No pastures greeted cows turned out after passing the winter inside. Disappointment.
I was afraid I had missed spring. Again.
Surprise, surprise. When I got back to New Sharon, I was greeted by full-on Midwestern spring. Warm days, humid but mobile air. Had it somehow been drawn here behind the overnight train carrying me from Chicago to South Station? Never mind. I hadn’t missed spring. I had found it in an unexpected spot. Maine.
Along about 2014 or 2015 we got another real Midwestern spring. I felt I could pick out transplanted Midwesterners on the street by their smiles of recognition of “real spring.”
Six months hence, or maybe just four or five, Midwesterners can board the leaf-peeper tour buses and turn their envy toward us as they come to watch our leaves turn.
Our first autumn in New Sharon taught us about the 180-degree turn we had taken from Missouri to Maine. Marilyn worked at UMF and walked around campus, mouth agape at the colors on the limbs and on the lawns and streets as each leaf fluttered down to its fate.
Her co-workers were, if not blasé, rather matter of fact about it all. We learned why soon enough. They knew what followed the pretty leaves. And 1980-81 was the coldest winter we can recall. On Jan. 4, 1981, three thermometers on the Gage corner in New Sharon (Route 2, about two miles east of Farmington Falls) read 40, 42 44. Below.
In the Missouri to Maine turn-around we traded spring for autumn. I turned my back on the glory of Midwestern spring, and in front of this Janus was the glory of Maine autumn.
The trip each year to set up our concession stand at the Fryeburg Fair was our welcome to autumn. Route 5 down through Bethel to Fryeburg always had gorgeous scenery, and different, each of the four days we hauled gear to our stand. After the fair, we often hit peak foliage for two days hauling gear back to the farm to put to bed for 49 weeks.
2002 was so spectacular that a week after the fair, Marilyn and I took a room at Center Lovell and just sat on the porch reading the Sunday paper, drove around the Mount Washington Valley, rode the tourist train at North Conway and discovered the Wild River Gorge in Gilead, which became our favorite leaf-peeping spot for the rest of her life.
But now that it’s April, I still miss spring. We might get a real spring after the mud dries. But stay alert. It may not last long. And then poof, and it’s gone.
Bob Neal can dream, can’t he? Whether of the Kansas City Royals or of the snow melting in Kennebunk so he might place flowers on his mother’s grave on May 13. He still misses spring.
Bob Neal
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