March’s lully not good for everyone

We’re well nigh into spring if you look at the number of orange-posted roads and the melting patches of snow in the woodlands. Not to mention the lully created in the dooryard.

If you don’t know what a lully is, you’re not from around here. Nor have you ever bogged down in the quagmire called Maine mud season, which came earlier this year due to the unusually mild winter.

According to the late John Gould, a lully is “a soggy, boggy mess,” often identified with the wet area around a barnyard manure pile. Since paved roads, Gould wrote, the term mud season “has lost some of its pithiness. Mud season was Maine’s fifth season (the others are Fall, Winter, Spring, and July). When the frost was leaving the ground, teaming was suspended, the dooryard was a lully, and Mother made everybody take off boots on the doorstep,” he wrote.

This particular winter, the frost has shot up out of the ground like a spring hyacinth, leaving dirt roads, driveways and playgrounds looking more like mud flats. Even the dogs need galoshes when running in the lower field, which thawed way back in February and squishes like a sponge when you walk over the blueberry and cranberry plants.

Who can complain about mud season when it means the frost has let go, the ponds will soon ice-out and spring is as near – well, almost – as the spectacles on your nose? In fact, who can complain at all, given the pleasant winter we’ve had around these parts when the temperature hasn’t been subzero except a couple of times?

Apparently, lots of people. The skiers are complaining and so are the snowmobilers, ice-fishers, loggers, even syrup makers and farmers. According to a news story this week, the warmer weather pattern is confusing maple syrup producers, who were tempted to tap their trees during the

springlike weather that marked much of the winter.

Loggers have experienced a tough season, unable to move heavy equipment into the soft woods to harvest lumber. So too the restaurant and lodging industry dependent on winter outdoor sports, anything from cross-country skiing to ice-fishing derbies.

While some of us are tickled to see a little bit warmer winter this year, especially with electric rates and fuel costs soaring, we sympathize with those whose traditional businesses have taken a hit.

It’s hard to tell what March will bring; even harder to understand the meaning of this old proverb:

“If March comes in with adder’s head, it goes out with peacock tail.”