by Sonja Hakala

There’s a weariness to the end of winter as it slides into spring. People are tired of boots. Tired of wearing heavy coats and mittens. Tired of shoveling.

When you think about it, closing the door on winter and opening it to spring carries with it a clear demarcation between seasons. You just know when it’s happened. By contrast, when you round the calendar’s corner from spring into summer, there isn’t a single “event” that signals the start of the warmest months. It’s just less cold, the flowers are more abundant, and the scent of barbecue is in the air.

And moving from summer into autumn is a slow parade of subtle changes—the weakening of chlorophyll in the leaves, fewer minutes of sunlight that gradually mount up to six o’clock sunsets, and then the sight of those first red leaves.

But in Vermont, folks do whatever they can to push winter to one side. First there’s the cheering sight of maple sap buckets hanging from the trees and steam billowing out of the windowed cupolas on top of the sugarhouses. Suddenly the boot collection by the back door expands from just the insulated kind with crampons strapped on the bottom to rubber boots and rubber galoshes and, in time, sturdy sneakers.

People downgrade from their heaviest coats to the more middling variety, including the one you throw on to fetch the mail and the other one that you wear into town. 

The first adventurers into their front yards gather fallen limbs and branches knocked down by high winds and ice. Children of all ages (as in eight to eighty) play with the water braiding its way down every available slope as the frost leaves the ground. (“Sailing away on a muddy day designed for play—tra la!”)

By this time of the year, barring some strange weather occurrence, the final push to spring is at hand. And that final push includes raking snow.

Let me explain to the uninitiated. Vermont is a land of folds. Our ground is always busy going up or going down, and this unique feature provides an abundance of nooks and crannies  where shadows hide.

Those shadowy nooks keep the snow safe from the sun far into April. It happens on the backsides of trees on sloped lawns, at the bottoms of hills that face north, under rocky overhangs, and in the places where the winter’s army of snow plows, snowblowers, and shovels made deep piles of the white stuff.

Except by this time, it’s not really snow at all but ice crystals and gravel and dirt, and everyone is sick of looking at it.

This snow raking always amused Ruth Goodwin on her rounds for the post office. Her friend Agnes Findley was usually the first snow raker of the season. Armed with an especially lethal metal rake, Agnes attacks the pile of white on the northwest corner of the house she shares with her partner Charlie Cooper, spreading it out on their driveway so it can melt. Charlie, on the other hand, uses a small hay fork on the last bits hidden behind the stone wall that marks their vegetable garden. It wasn’t until he was done that he noticed the sprinkling of small yellow flowers stirring on the stalks of the forsythia. A grin took over the lower part of his face as he stroked the petals and touched the tips of the tiny leaves accompanying them.

“It won’t be long now,” he whispered.

Aggie and Charlie were just the beginning of the townwide effort to rid itself of winter. Everywhere Ruth drove, she saw people digging, gouging, raking, and sometimes even stomping the last bits of ice into oblivion.

At the end of the day, as she turned toward home along the route that snaked by the marshy area at the east end of Half Moon Lake, Ruth slowed down, and opened the windows of her Jeep. At a wide spot in the road, she pulled over, nose to nose with Gideon Brown’s truck.

They nodded at one another as they leaned against their vehicles then stood in silent vigil to listen to the first glowing notes of the spring peepers.

The sun had returned, and for the moment, all was right with the world.

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The Carding Chronicles are short stories written by author Sonja Hakala about the Vermont town that no one can quite find on a map. They feature the characters in the four Carding novels.

The Carding books are available from Amazon and the Chronicles appear here, on this website, every Monday. Hope to see you next week.