Every May I drive from the Washington, D.C., area to my part-time residence on Great Cranberry Island. Going from a major metropolitan area to a tiny island community like this is almost as transformative as international travel – starting in a city jangling with rush-hour traffic jams and legislative logjams, then ending in a place where the powers that be are not political forces but the force of tides, wind and waves. And here, I always find that nature’s calendar is turned to a different page.
One of the former boathouses-turned-studios is seen on Great Cranberry Island at the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation for artists in July 2007. On Great Cranberry, “the powers that be are not political forces but the force of tides, wind and waves,” Janet Hook writes. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer, File
The 700-mile drive north and east is like time travel, taking me back to experience my favorite season, spring, all over again. When I leave the Washington area in May, spring is fading and summer heat is about to break over the swampy city.
But here on Great Cranberry, spring is still unfolding. There, the air conditioning has been cranked up; here, I start the chill mornings in three layers of flannel, sweats and fleece. In the garden, nature’s clock has been turned back a month or more. As I began the drive to Maine, our blazing azaleas had already dropped their flowers. Washington’s famed cherry blossoms were a distant memory. But here fruit trees are still in flower and lilacs are atomizing their heady perfume.
I left behind a backyard crowded with flourishing ferns; here in my island yard, fiddleheads are still unfurling. Trees are wearing their light green, early-spring garb. The bogs here are still mostly brown but are decorated with flamboyant green splashes of skunk cabbage, a pioneering, heat-generating plant that can begin growing even when the ground is frozen. The lupines have just begun their distinctive bottom-up process of opening flowers from a central stalk.
The white-throated sparrows we see in winter down south are now here in Maine, greeting my return with their familiar clear whistle (“O sweet Canada Canada Canada!”). The imposing osprey, which I occasionally saw flying through the Washington area, are now busy building and tending their nests atop trees with panoramic views of Great Cranberry’s coastal waterways.
All this points to a global perspective on seasonal change: Spring is not a season that comes and goes in linear fashion. It is a transition of nature that spreads across the planet in different times and places, at different paces. Put another way: It’s always spring somewhere.
Spring is a soul-enriching season that is widely beloved for its fresh emerging beauty, its lengthening days, its promise of rebirth and hope. Ernest Hemingway, in “A Moveable Feast,” captured the boundless optimism of the season: “When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.’’
But more important to me, it is a season that clamors for attention to detail – and rewards it mightily. Everything changes day by day – in the garden, in the angle of the sun, in the day’s length, in the birds and animals who make their appearance. Of course, change is constant in every season; maybe spring can help us carry heightened perceptions into the rest of the year.
I consider it a gift that I get to experience spring twice.
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