Cold, gray spring irks coast dwellers

An old Scottish weather proverb tells us to “Cast not a clout till May be out.” So, I’ve been holding off on the clout casting while eagerly waiting for May to be out. May with her fog mull, May with her drizzle, May with her cold wind, May with her clouds – especially along the Down East coast, as the weather forecasters are wont to say.

For weeks now, sunshine has poked out its smiley face in various sections of Maine, raising temperatures and spirits from York to Fort Kent. Yet along the Down East coast a pervasive dampness threatens to rot the rhubarb and mildew the fiddleheads.

“Highs in the 70s, except cooler [by more-or-less 30 degrees] along the coast,” say meteorologists. “Periods of sun, except on the coast.

“Fair skies and warmer over much of the state, except the coast where the cloud cover remains.”

After a winter that was twice as cold as zero, we coast-clingers deserved better than such a chilly, wet spring. The forsythia never turned gold before leafing out and the flowering crab apple never flowered. If the truth be known, there hasn’t been enough sunshine to dry cod.

“Did you winter well?” asked the summer folk who arrived en masse over the Memorial Day weekend, expecting to hear the usual, courteous answer: “Nicely, thank you.”

But this year’s livid responses from some of us weren’t fit for printing. Why, you’d have to be tough as a pitch knot to have endured this past winter without bellyaching about the brutal wind and deep freeze.

The winter took its toll, no doubt about it. Golf courses lost entire greens to winter kill. Rosebushes were frozen to death. The huge spirea was half-ruined; the burning bush, stunted. Spruce trees were uprooted. The old cherry tree was split into three trunks. Clematis vines were mutilated.

Day by day during May we kept scratching on bark to see if something green had shown underneath. We kept waiting for sunshine to entice the apple blossoms. We kept waiting to fling open the windows and turn off the furnace.

The legendary John Gould told the story about Tudor Gardiner campaigning for governor of Maine and rowing out to Beals Island in a dense fog. Apparently Gardiner found everyone as downcast as the weather, all of them sitting in their bait houses to wait out a fog mull. Tudor asked one lobsterman, “Aren’t you interested in politics?” He answered, “I ain’t int-risted in a gahdam thing till this fog scales off.”

We, along the cooler-and-cloudier coast, have been waiting for May to be out … and June to be in.