Waiting Season

There's a season of the year here in Maine that many people have never heard of. It comes late in winter when the rest of the world is celebrating early spring, or for years like this it hangs around till most of the nation is in full spring bloom.

It's mud season... again

When it's mud season there's normally still quite an accumulation of the past winter's snow that has aways to go still before it's gone. Under and all around that old snow is wet soft ground, the kind that if you step in it or drive in it, well it just turns to mud.

So we don't step in it and if we can help it we don't drive in it. Instead, we wait. We wait for the snow to all melt. We wait for the spring water table to drop back down to normal. We wait for spring rains to harden up our dirt roads and our driveways. We don't wait for the frost heaves to go back down or get repaired but if we have any sympathy at all for our cars we drive slower until they do.

We wait for the frost to go out of the ground and for our gardens to dry up enough to get back in them so we can till something other than mud.

And we wait for ice-out. We wait till we can look out over the ponds and lakes and see beautiful blue water again. We're still waiting for that. Heck we're still waiting for the whole thing to warm up, dry out, and become spring!

I drove up to the airport today and went for a long walk. Most of the snow is gone now around all the crushed slate at the airport taxiway construction site. They should be coming back after mud season. There is an enormous amount of crushed black shale (slate) in piles where they ran rock crushers all last fall.

Then I walked the dirt roads from the airport down to the outlet of Wilson Pond taking the side road into the old hydro generator station. I was surprised to see as much water as there was in Wilson Stream. It couldn't have been more than a week ago the last time I went to Wilson Pond and the water level was way down. After the power house side trail I went to the public boat launch, still closed for the winter, and found that the water level now in Wilson Pond is almost back to its normal summer level.

From there I walked the shore road across to Walden's Landing and couldn't help but notice how all the spring brooks are carrying off all the runoff from the melting snow.

So I say to myself, self, you know what that means, don't you? It means all signs of winter will be gone before we know it! Then a few weeks later, mud season will be done and we can all stop waiting.