Reclaiming Spring
the best season is whichever one we're in
I have not thought about writing a newsletter in three months. The winter felt so long and dark and cold. We got a ton of snow here in Maine (and there’s a good chance we’ll continue to get more into early April). But all of a sudden it’s spring and the harsh severity of life in winter has been dulled. There is so much to do, so many wonderful things to anticipate. I forgot what it feels like to be warmed by the sun and not the grid. I didn’t realize how much I missed it.
Last week, I drove down to New Jersey to visit family for a long weekend. When I left Maine it was barely 40 degrees and dreary. Over the course of the six hour drive, the temperature kept climbing until it hit 82* on the parkway. Something about having the windows down on the highway and not feeling any remnant of winter in the air altered my brain chemistry.
I don’t remember having a specific appreciation for spring growing up. My acknowledgment of the seasons was always tied to the school year - the smell of the falling leaves in September meant I was another grade older; the lengthening of days in March meant the countdown to summer vacation and the possibility of playing outside after I finished my homework. Since I’ve started farming, I pay much closer attention to the changing of the seasons. This year, I want to cherish the spring just a little bit more - I’ve developed a bad tendency to view the spring as nothing more than a trampoline that launches us into summer, with annually worsening reminders of our changing climate. But the spring season and its bounty are so short-lived. So welcome to this little spring appreciation post.
If you’re a farmer, this time of year gets stressful and busy so quickly. But as someone who’s never owned a farm or had to bear the full burden of responsibility for it, I miss farming the most in March. Tapping maple trees, spending all day filling trays and starting seeds in a toasty greenhouse, watching the garlic sprout and the rhubarb patch return. Hauling crates of dahlia tubers out of their winter home in the root cellar. And later in the spring, around mid-May, when the ground is workable and the transplanting is in full force, the whole property is perfumed with the smell of lilacs. Everything in spring is so fleeting - the daffodils and forsythia and lilacs arrive and fade in such a frenzy. Locally grown rhubarb and strawberries are only in season for a handful of weeks. The same is true for asparagus (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - if you haven’t harvested fresh asparagus and eaten it straight out of the ground, add that to your spring 2026 bingo card).
We’ll have summer tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini for months. And the pumpkins and potatoes and onions that we wait so patiently to harvest in the fall will last all winter. But spring is the first and last chance for so many glorious things. We’ll blink and be at the 4th of July. It will be too hot and buggy for spinach and arugula. The garlic scapes will have curled twice and been harvested. And spring in all her coy impermanence will be gone. Even as it seems like all of nature is being reborn, there are always little deaths along the way. Which is why I feel so pulled toward witnessing and appreciating these next two months. Whether you just celebrated Eid or the equinox, or you’re looking forward to a Passover seder or sunrise Easter service, I hope you are doing something to feel so deeply rooted in our wild good fortune to be here this spring.
Some lovely little quotes about this season:
“If people did not love one another, I really don’t see what use there would be in having any spring” ~Hugo
“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart” ~Rilke
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself” ~Hemingway
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt” ~Atwood
“Little deaths” is one of my favorite phrases