Ah, spring, when an old guy’s thoughts turn to summer

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A few autumns ago, a friend arrived from China, and she was pretty nervous about the Maine winter. How deep will the snow get? she wanted to know. And how much lower will the temperature go than it does in Shanghai, where it is famously too hot in summer and too cold in winter?

Before I could answer, she said with classic Chinese cheerfulness that someone had told her “spring in Maine is very beautiful.”

I thought long and hard before I replied to this. I did not know who could have said it, or why. Whether spring even exists in Maine has been debated at least since my ancestors arrived in Boothbay three centuries ago. In human time, deep winter lasts approximately three to four decades each year, and then March and April set in. They’re warmer months than February, but think about it: The bitterest three days of this winter occurred in March, and northeast of Lewiston it almost always snows in April. Certainly there is a sense of relief when the daytime temperature stops sliding below 20. And when snowbanks start receding there is a great sense of hope that a mythic moment known in legend as “summer” actually might exist. But relief and hope do not by themselves imply “spring,” let alone “beauty.”

It’s true that on May 2 (in Troy at least) dandelions suddenly pop up and authentically warm sunshine can appear. So my friend’s informant might have been referring to a week or two that includes the blossoming of lilacs. But I’ve sat in Little League bleachers around Memorial Day shivering in a Shanghai-bought winter jacket, and slapping black flies. After that, summer hits almost exactly June 1.

I’ve seen true spring – in Shanghai, Athens, and in England, where mild days and flowers burgeon as early as February – and it definitely is not happening here anytime soon. March, it has been observed, was devised in Maine so people who don’t drink will know what a hangover is like. Our driveway, for example, is a rumpled sheet of tundra ice by night, and a mud slick by day. If any more rain or slush falls in the next few weeks, it will revert to an arroyolike state we helplessly name “A River Runs Through It.” Meanwhile, spots of sludge are drying on the slate floor in the kitchen. Piles of rotting bird seed are appearing on the porch under the feeders. Black ice flares on Route 9 most nights. Holes have opened in previously smooth pavement. Deciduous trees remain skeletons. Pant legs are spattered and stained. Gray mist euphemistically called “fog” swells out of melting snowfields like netherworld smokes. My Shanghai coat breaks the wind by day but I freeze in it at night. The NOAA says Maine’s mean temperature for this month is just under 27 degrees. And by the way, the first day of spring was last week. Overall, I need a drink.

I did not say any of this to my friend. I just let her keep believing in spring. Like the rest of us.

– DWILDE@BANGORDAILYNEWS.NET