People’s heads this time of year are filled with romantic notions of springtime: Flowery breezes teasing through the bedroom curtains. Children racing down pathways breathless with abandon. Lovers on the lawn.

These people do not live in the North Country – an area of the world roughly defined by that population scattered across the upper latitudes who own a pair of rubber boots. In Alaska, where I spent twenty-five winters, the thing that came next was not called Spring. It was called Breakup.

Originally this term was applied to the river ice -- which literally breaks up and flushes downstream with the undeniable message that it’s time to put away your dogsled and dust off the canoe. But as Alaska became more civilized, the micro-season known as Breakup could be applied to all manner of vernal dysfunctions from marriages to personal sanity -- but most particularly -- to roads.

Driveways become oozing pits of axle-grabbing vanilla fudge twirl. And while your grass may begin to look green – it is merely a deception of color over chocolate pudding. Sounds tasty, but one step and you will find yourself up to the ankle in what you once thought of as your yard.

In Vermont, where I live now and the weather is no better than Alaska, this gooey little interlude is called -- quite to the point -- Mud Season. It is the time when the famously pastoral back roads of northern New England attempt to return to the wild. It is when farmers with their entire tractors disappear into fields never to be heard from again. It’s also when you decide that knee-high black rubber boots look good with just about everything in your closet.

In other parts of the country that first scent of budding leaves might draw all eyes upward in praise of the gift of spring, but in the North you will find our eyes cast down in search of frost boils and sink holes. While joy fills hearts like cherry blossoms across the temperate zones, spring rains fill our northern basements beyond the capacities of our sump pumps.

This is how we live. Spring in the North is not something one enjoys. It is something one earns.

There is a 19th century proverb that says: It is not spring until you can plant your foot upon twelve daisies. In more contemporary terms: It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

Sure we smell the flowers and the sweet field grasses tease us with thoughts of summer, but we hold our happiness in reserve. Perhaps you’ve noticed this about us. We can’t help it. Nature forms our natures.

And then, one day, it’s over. The bottom layer of frost finally leaves the ground, the water drains clear almost literally in one day, and the Earth forms once again under our feet. Only then do we look up, breath in, and take off our boots.

As heard on public radio’s Weekend America
with Bill Radke and Barbara Bogave
April 2, 2005
www.weekendamerica.org