Goodbye winter! No one is sadder to say this than me, I absolutely love winter, and even though I feel like Vermont is the Scandinavia of the United States, I still sometimes think I should actually be living in Scandinavia, I just love winter that much. Norway, here I come!
Spring is probably the hardest season to photograph here, let’s face it, it’s a lot of sticks and mud (they call it mud season but I’m being polite and calling it Shoulder Season Part II ha!) and not a lot of green. And then there are the never-ending icebergs of snow, even with a few warm rains, those pesky snow piles still stick around (another Vermont-ism, they call spring snow the “poor man’s fertilizer”). As someone who lives down the road from a chicken poop fertilizer maker, I gotta say, I’ll take the snow!
Down further south in places like Boston, flowers start bursting into bloom, but it’s so slow for us up here. The first signs of spring in Vermont are the forsythia, and I love their bright yellow cheer! But everything else is really a long time coming, there’s a damp chill in the air, it rains a lot, and it’s just rough. The other thing is, it’s not a good season for outdoor sports, and outdoor sports are my jam! So you can’t ski unless you get lucky with a late-season blizzard, it’s often too cold and wet to golf, and you can’t hike because it’s dangerous to the ecosystem to hike in the mud (not to mention dangerous to you as a hiker!). I get through winter by getting outside and running and skiing 3 or 4 hours a day when I can, it is wonderful, and if you don’t like to ski there’s snowmobiling, fat tire biking, snowshoeing, the list goes on! But spring is definitely a super boring season here, and it can drag on as well. Memorial Day last year was wet and freezing, it even snowed a bit in some of the higher altitude ski mountains, so you really don’t get relief until say mid-June (though I tell people to plan a trip to Vermont in mid-July and August, when you’re pretty much guaranteed good weather!).
I know the hope of summer is just a few short months away, but they seem long to me, this is the only time I get depressed living in Vermont. But if you’re here full-time you definitely get some bright spots of relief with warmer, longer days and the promise of the summer to come, but I get grumpy and bored fast in March, April and May! As I said, it’s hard to take photos during these months too, but I force myself to get out and make things as beautiful as I can, enjoy, summer (and then fall and winter again) are just around the bend, and we make the most of every day we’re given!
