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| Yep, that's snow behind him. |
Ah, New Hampshire.
When Robert Frost wrote perhaps his most famous poem, "Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening," he had been up all night working on a poem called, simply, "New Hampshire." He wrote, "Stopping By," as it were, to unwind from "New Hampshire."
I can see how that might work.
Today, May 2nd, started bright and beautiful in Dover, NH, still chilly at 8:30, but the sun was warm on our necks and we knew the first real Spring day was dawning.
But in the corner of St. Thomas Aquinas's field was that last snow pile, encrusted in mud, an image immortalized by Ms. Maud in her complaint last year about the tardiness of New Hampshire Spring. The last lump of snow, crowned with mud in her back yard brought out all the New England in her. She has mentioned she thinks about that mud encrusted lump at all sorts of odd and inopportune times, but that's another story.
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| Doesn't bother these guys. |
It is true, where I grew up, it's eighty degrees today and has been for weeks. The cherry blossoms have peaked and the azaleas have long since flowered and there is a green haze in the air from all the pollen, and the air is heavy with water and oxygen from the green lawns and trees and shrubs and the Potomac is rising, green swift, and brown in places, and turtles are sunning themselves on the rocks, and the occasional snake, and muskrats and beavers and foxes and deer play hide and seek with hikers along the towpath running along the Maryland side of the river. Spring starts in late March down there, and the snow vanishes by then, and Spring runs through the end of May, when suddenly, it's summer.
Not so in New Hampshire, where Spring flirts with you, and only shows a bare leg hesitantly, then draws it back and then out again and it's like that until May. But the air up here is so breathable. In the South, the air weighs on you, and you struggle to carry it and breathing is a chore. Up in New Hampshire, the air lifts you and courses through you like a cool stream, energizing, electric.
I don't care about mud on the snow. New Hampshire does Spring just right.
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| Like granola on your yogurt |
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteThat is one sizable lump of snow beside the field -much larger than anything still present in the towns just south of Dover...Dirty, but impressive-a reminder winter in NH is nothing if not resilient.. You have done a lovely job of capturing the differences between spring in your old home and in your new..It would seem in the South winter and spring are on cordial terms, while in NH, winter doesn't go without a fight...Would have to agree a baseball game on a morning like today's is one of life's little gifts-something to be savored..
Maud
Ms. Maud,
ReplyDelete"Winter and Spring are on cordial terms."
Oh, Emily Dickensen could not have said it better.
They will be organizing bus tours to your New Hampshire home someday.
Phantom