April Showers

The sky was gray, the water was still, and the grass below my feet sagged with the weight of mud. I could sense the season of spring in Port Clyde yesterday. The St George peninsula was coming back to life. The once frozen and snow covered fields and dirt roads in town were now slowly turning into muddy avenues of melted snow. The birds that flew south for the winter had now returned in abundance. Seagulls swooped and soared all around me, diving and dipping their beaks in the cool waters of Muscongus Bay. The temperature approached 60 degrees, which felt downright balmy after the winter we Mainers had just endured. The air was sweet with the smell of rain, and that particular smell is so sweet to the senses! It represents a seemingly lazy indifference in the air. No longer does the sky feel like it will explode with snow and wind. No longer does the the sun look like it will set before afternoon reaches it's end. This is the time for hope and optimism. This is the time to witness the rebirth of the natural world, and watch the land break out of it's long and cold winter hibernation. I found a lovely old spruce tree to sit under as a light rain began to fall. There was nothing but quiet around me. The silence enveloped me like a gentle wave that reaches the shore and lingers for a while before the tide inevitably pulls it back. The sweet sound of rain began to breach the silence as the pitter patter of drizzle hit the ocean with a soft echo that reverberated all around the shore. My back against the spruce, in a small cove on the backside of Port Clyde Harbor, I watched the rain fall, and watched my favorite season arrive. Slowly but surely, spring had come to the coast of Maine. As they say, April showers will bring May flowers, and I can't wait for May.