One week into spring, and just see how fast carpenters drive around town in their pickups, rushing from one work site to the other now that summer deadlines loom like storm clouds.

Just look at fishermen, readying their lobster traps, stacking them on trailers that wobble and sway on the bumpy roads, or painting buoys by the hundreds and hanging them to dry as they would salty stripped fish in summertime.

One week into spring and the huge snow mound out back has shrunk daily, vanishing into the soggy ground the way a snowman built by kids grows shorter and shorter until it disappears into a puddle – broomstick, scarf and hat lying in a pile.

The “for sale” signs that pop up every spring about the same time as crocuses mark various businesses or houses in coastal Maine, each new sign accompanied by gossip and scuttlebutt in the communities, each new real estate listing rising in price and expectation.

Potholes grow deeper as the sun climbs higher.

Such is the season when the old-fashioned mudroom in a house becomes the most essential, with people and pets tracking sand and globs of thawed dirt across the floor littered with snow boots and muck boots, galoshes and slippers. A Maine house without a mudroom is as incomplete as one without a wood stove.

There’s another sure sign of spring Down East. While the maple trees are being tapped for their sugary sap, townspeople throughout the area likewise are being tapped. March traditionally has been town meeting time for many communities, and residents have conducted the business of raising taxes to support schools and streets, plowing and policing as well as a myriad of other line-item appropriations deliberated annually in town hall after town hall.

One doesn’t even need to look at the calendar to know it’s finally spring around this neck of the woods. Just watch the activity flurrying around, some people being so busy all of a sudden they don’t have time to keep the stove filled with wood, though temperatures hover at freezing.

Folks are outside shingling for a change; they’re lighting burn piles heaped with brush and limbs left from the fall; they’re sanding boats and repairing roofs. They’re building sheds and finishing porches.

Last weekend, on the day before Easter, they were washing cars in the driveway as if it were high summer while just two weeks ago they shoveled a foot of snow off that same driveway.

Others take advantage of every sunny day, despite the lingering chill, and drape their clotheslines with sheets snapping in the breeze – one of the first signals of spring, long before colorful kites soar over the golf course or youngsters are seen playing Frisbee on the playground.

When shirts and socks can be hung on the line, one can be sure the deep freeze of winter is long gone, and spring is as certain as woodcock on the lawn.

Or honking geese. Or smelts in the streams.