Smoke from chimneys leak into houses,

windows cracked eager to suck in anything fresh.

Elated Mothers, doffing last year’s LL Bean spring collections, no longer scold frisky pent-up children for leaving doors wide-open. Soon, they’ll shriek about thick blackish gray mud trekked in all day and night, but not yet. 

Dirty iced snow hangs on like lung lichen, yellowish green quackgrass creeps from underneath slowly, surely. Glow in the dark frisbee, hundreds of white pinecones (the state flower), rusty pliers, and short homemade redwood flower boxes emerge like forgotten Bates cairns in Acadia.

Mainers express spring giddiness in obdurate ways: runners in shorts flashing bright red legs we mistake for leggings. Ice fishers on thin ice drink Allen’s Coffee Brandy before two hands align north, show no concern for loud cracking, popping or catching fish. Dozens of flashily dressed bicyclists and one hardy motorcyclist careens along barren secondary roads wary of black ice, moose, remnants of the last polar vortex, and the oncoming tourist crush, pandemic be damned. 

This preseason lasts a week, two at most, and nobody talks about it, not like the three or four weeks of mud season that everyone bemoans. We gleefully say good riddance winter, we love and worship you, but it’s time to put our useless sleds up in the rafters, hang dulled ice skates on nails, and throw our busted snow shovels in the repair pile. Time for skateboards, hammocks, patio furniture, and the great battle against ticks, mosquitoes, voles, and the relentless wild weeds.

But first, chilly mornings and brisk sunny days that linger like the great Jack Frost must hold sway as long as inhumanly possible. As if he or she needs to provide us this small steppingstone into the slop and muck, or we would completely lose our minds about the great melt if we didn’t get this flashing-suspended-anime-prespring moment.  And I trust in this, the same way I trust maple sap will always run in time for sugar shacks to pump out their golden syrupy goods and meet demand on the fourth Sunday in March. I trust it, even though most Mainers overlook the prelude as a mild extension of winter, or the official start of the unspeakable, inevitable mushy defrost. I trust there are others like me, a few, perhaps many, that don our black rubber Bogs and tromp around the yards not truly needing knee-high boots because we don’t sink four or five inches into murk. We don’t miss our insulated winter boots or our double wool socks, but we know to stay in the sun as much as possible or our feet will grow numb in no time at all.