Thursday, April 23, 2015

April 23, 2015 - Limbo


Here we are in “limbo” again, waiting for the season to decide what it wants to do.  The snow has melted in most places, except for up north in the county.  Torrential rains have begun, and the rivers are swelling quite a bit.  Trees on the shoreline are now submerged everywhere, and hopefully they’ll survive the waterlogging.  Add a hailstorm into the mix today with hail balls over a quarter of an inch in size, and it just adds to the feeling of absolute limbo.  The ground turned white again for a few minutes, and then everything quickly melted once again.

But . . . here and there I see a bud or a little swelling on a stalk or branch.  It keeps my spirits up amid the flooding and freak hailstorms.  We are almost into May now, and at the rate we are going, the trees will not finish leafing out until the end of May/beginning of June.  We sometimes leaf out by mid-May, but only in warmer years.  This has not been a warmer year.  Still, it’s a price we pay in Maine for perfect summers.

The old folks have a saying here:  “If you can’t stand the winters, you don’t deserve the summers.”  Well, I have stood them for a good long time now, so I deserve this coming summer.

The rivers are flooding.