I am writing this a week or so before April 1, so I cannot predict what the weather will be like, only that it will be unpredictable. As we basked in the sun last week, finding shoots emerging from ground freshly exposed by melting ice, it certainly felt like spring had not just officially begun, but that the season had actually turned.

But, I remember many times on April 1 when Maine’s weather played the best prank by taunting us with warm sunshine-soaked afternoons only to then dump a pile of snow over the tips of shivering crocus. You are only made an April fool if you don’t, to some degree, expect this.

Once you live in Maine for a few cycles of seasonal changes, you do expect that this is maybe not the way life should be, but it is the way that it is. This is particularly true if you keep track of what happens over the year, even if very simply. There is a growing interest in doing this through nature journaling and some wonderful books that can help you to keep track of major events throughout the year like “The Naturalist’s Notebook: An Observation Guide” and “5-Year Calendar-Journal for Tracking Changes in the Natural World around You,” by Bernd Heinrich and local ornithologist Nat Wheelwright.

Organizations like the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust have hosted workshops on nature journaling and how to make your own journal. You can do this with any notebook or even a calendar. You can stick to just a few major events like the first and last snowfall or when the first leaf emerges in your yard, or record more specific observations more frequently.

One of the biggest events along the coast is when the ice disappears for the last time. There are several interim comings and goings of the ice along the shore, but at a certain point the balance has shifted and the water will stay in liquid form until the next winter. As a part of a couple of projects I did with my girls, we took photos and wrote observations each week and, during the pandemic, I finally got around to putting each set into a book. When the first day of spring came last week and we were sitting outside in short-sleeves like sun-struck lizards, I pulled them out. The first year’s project was to follow the changes in a tree in our backyard.

On March 20, 2018, we climbed on snow piles to look for buds on our trees, but the next week, my girls were sitting up in their trees without coats above bare ground. The next year’s project was to pick a spot along the coast to visit each week. On March 20, 2019, there was beautiful clear water along the coast, but the week before, we were stacking up pancake ice and wiggling into snow caves in the rocks. In 2020, we built a stick fort in the backyard that served as an outdoor play area. We built it just after the start of the pandemic. It was bare sticks and dirt on March 20, but, by the next week we had wrapped a tarp around it, surrounded it with giant snow thrones, and drank hot chocolate inside.

What does this tell us about changes in weather? Not very much, perhaps, given that I’m comparing an in-town backyard with the coast across different years. And, without being a climatologist, it is hard to say whether things are getting warmer over the years. What is certainly true, however, is that things are very different from year to year, and that spring is the season of unpredictability. It’s just as hard to say when the last patch of ice will disappear from the shady corner of my driveway as it is to predict when I will see the first new shoots of marsh grass poking up from the softened intertidal mud.

Living in Maine, all things both wild and human have to learn to be flexible and resilient in order to make it through the constant shiftings of spring. This is particularly true during this 2021 spring of transition (fingers crossed) to a more free and healthy living situation as the pandemic situation improves and restrictions begin to ease.

We, too, are coming out of our hibernation cautiously like many of the creatures that have been cozy in their dens, swimming closer to the surface again as the fish that have holed up in the depths during the blustery winter. Nature’s patterns are instructive not only for what they tell us about the changes in our climate, but also for how impressive the adaptability of nature truly is.

Perhaps, as we appreciate this more, we can find ways to adapt ourselves along with it in ways that will allow it to stay as resilient as possible. We can consider our actions along the coast in terms of what we build and how we built it, what goes into the water and what doesn’t, and what we take or don’t take out of the water. There is a balance to strive for that could be just as sweet as when we finally get to Maine summer after the imbalances of the emerging spring have settled.

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