Getting Ready
What April Feels Like This Year, and Every Year
Friday, we drove past Lake Wentworth on the way to meet with some new clients. And, we’re happy to report, Wentworth has gone out.
If you know, you know. If you don’t, here’s what it means: the ice on Lake Wentworth cleared. We also heard a report that Great East Lake is ice free, and that a mating pair of loons has been sighted. Somewhere in the Lakes Region, thousands of people are quietly exhaling.
Winnipesaukee will be next. It always is. The big lake takes longer; more surface, more depth, more to surrender. But it will go. It always goes.
This has been happening long enough that the sequence feels like a kind of grammar. Wentworth first. Then Winni. Then the boats appearing on trailers in driveways. Then the beautiful chaos of Memorial Day weekend, the exuberant bright counterpoint to every day of mud and rain.
We know what’s coming. That’s the thing about April here. You know what’s coming. Summer.
The world is not easy right now.
We want to say that plainly, without softening it into something more comfortable than it is. Decisions are being made far from us about things that will touch our lives and the lives of millions of others. That has always been true. It will always be true. But in this particular April, it feels heavier than it has in some time. The news arrives in waves. The uncertainty sits in the body differently than it used to. We notice it in ourselves, and we notice it in the people around us.
We are not going to tell you to look away from that. We’re not interested in that kind of comfort.
But we do want to say something about what it means to have a place.
When the wider world goes loud and hard to hold, the local patterns don’t stop. They don’t pause for the news cycle or the market or the things that keep you up at three in the morning. The ice goes out on the same schedule it always has. The loons come back to the same coves as last year. The green shoots push through the dirt with the same patience they’ve always had, indifferent to everything happening above them.
This is not nothing. In fact, we think it might be one of the most important things.
There is something that happens when you belong to a place with its own rhythms; its own calendar that runs alongside the news and does not answer to it. Something steadying. Not a solution to anything. Not a reason to stop paying attention. But an anchor. A reminder that the world is also made of small, reliable things, and that those things are worth protecting and worth showing up for.
April in the Lakes Region is not our prettiest month. The mud is real. The trees are still bare and stark. The gray days stack up in a way that can feel personal. There’s a particular quality of light in mid-April, flat and noncommittal, that doesn’t photograph well and doesn’t make anyone feel poetic about where we live.
And yet.
The peepers start. If you haven’t heard a New Hampshire spring peeper chorus, we can’t fully describe it; you’ll have to stand at the edge of a wetland at dusk and feel it for yourself. The wood ducks and loons are back on the quieter coves. Someone on every road is doing something optimistic with a raised bed. The farm stands are a few weeks out, but the planning has already started. The conversations at the transfer station are a little longer than they were in February, which is how you know.
There’s a particular phrase for all of this, very New England, not especially romantic. We’re getting ready.
Not ready. Getting ready. April doesn’t ask you to arrive anywhere. It asks you to orient toward what’s coming. To trust, based on every year that has come before, that something worth showing up for is on its way.
The community here is real. That’s what we keep coming back to, in this particular April more than most. The relationships are real. The fact that your neighbor is also watching the lake, also uncovering the garden beds, also carrying that mix of tired and hopeful that this season produces; that’s real too. It matters in ways that are hard to quantify and easy to take for granted until the world gets heavy enough that you feel the weight of it.
We are lucky to live somewhere with this kind of ballast.
The ice goes out. The birds come back. The green shoots find their way. We get ready.
Here’s to April. Here’s to the place that keeps its own time.
🧭 Jenn & Andrea
Keys to the Lakes
