spring’s first signs, but wishing for snow

two consecutive pages (18 and 19) from my upcoming book - Sisters During Rocky Times

This time of year, as people eagerly await spring, I pray to Mother Nature for one last blast of snow. It was an unusually snowy winter in the Northeast, so I half-expected a snowstorm—or at least some flurries—when I visited my mother in Maine last weekend.

Instead, I was graced with spring’s first signs: the calls of the American Goldfinch, Tufted Titmouse, Raven, and Woodpecker, and ice thawing off two swamps that were once ponds when I was growing up. Real ponds with ecosystems that sustained the toads, frogs, and microscopic creatures we played with in spring and summer. In winter, those ponds were covered in snow and ice. We spent hours outside, playing on or near them.

If we didn’t have homework or it was the weekend, like any 1970s mom, my mother threw us out of the house. Even in the snow, she’d bundle us up and send us off with thermoses of hot chocolate. Tamara, me, and the neighborhood kids shoveled and skated on the ponds. Tamara credits those winters with her current Florida address.

I always thought my love for snow came from childhood—snow angels, sledding, making snowmen, skating, even cross-country skiing—but it seems my enchantment predates experience.

During this visit, my mother told Paul how much snowfall there was the year I was born. It didn’t stop until a month before I arrived in June! This love affair likely began while I was nestled inside her, as she navigated winter’s deep snow.