Spring Comes When it Wants Here
How you feel about that may tell you something important
Jenn stepped off the plane in Nashville, the city of her birth, this week and the humidity hit the second she cleared the jetway. Not summer humidity yet, but the slightly suffocating softness of air that hasn’t been frozen in several months. She knows from long experience what it becomes by July: the kind that makes you want a cool shower after walking from your frigid house to your air-conditioned car.
Outside the window that evening: birds. Plural, vocal, going about their business like it was perfectly normal to be a bird right now. Daffodils already up. Trees already showing that early green cloud, that first haze of buds that means something has quietly made a decision.
Thursday morning, 50 degrees on the way to the airport. People were cold. Genuinely shivering, pulling jackets tighter, complaining about the chill.
Jenn did not say anything. But she may have chosen not to put on the sweater in her carry-on, with only a slight New England smugness.
She checked the forecast before boarding: 19 to 56 degrees over the next ten days, three days showing rain, three showing snow, and the general meteorological posture of people too smart to commit to anything specific right now. The forecasters are hedging. They know what March in the Lakes Region actually is: a negotiation that hasn’t concluded yet.
There’s still plenty of snow on the ground. There will be for a while.
Spring doesn’t come late here so much as it comes on its own terms, and it will not be rushed, and it will not follow a schedule, and it occasionally fakes you out in the most spectacular way.
This year we hit 70 degrees. In March. For a few glorious hours that made everyone want to put away the plows and run straight to the garden center, which was not stocked yet, because the garden center knows something us mere mortals may choose to forget: that this was a visit, not an arrival. A reminder of what’s coming. Not the thing itself.
That’s the particular genius and particular cruelty of spring in the Lakes Region. It doesn’t withhold itself entirely. It teases. It offers evidence. A warm afternoon here, a chorus of birds there, and then 19 degrees on Tuesday and three inches of snow by Friday. The day lilies, when they finally come, don’t usually arrive until well into what other parts of the country call summer. The hydrangeas, which bloom so extravagantly here that they can stop you in the road, don’t reliably show until May.
For now, the ice on the lakes is still out there, still making up its mind.
Speaking of which: the betting pools for ice-out are going strong this year, and particularly active. It’s been a beautiful late winter, the kind that makes people optimistic and therefore opinionated. Everyone has a theory. Locals with decades of winters behind them are weighing in alongside people who have only seen a handful of ice-outs and are already deeply invested. This is one of the rituals of living here, the collective watching and waiting and debating over something that will happen exactly when it happens and not a moment before.
We should say something else about the melt, because it matters: last summer was dry. Genuinely, concerningly dry. The kind of summer that made well owners nervous and reminded everyone that the water we drink comes from somewhere, and that somewhere needs to be replenished. A fast, dramatic melt doesn’t really help with that. What we’re hoping for is gradual: steady warming, slow release, water making its way back down into the ground where it belongs. A gentle spring, however unglamorous that sounds, is the one we actually need right now.
So we are watching the forecast. Crossing our fingers the melt continues apace. And waiting.
There’s a particular pleasure in things that take a long time to arrive, especially when that arrival can’t be fully predicted.
Not everyone feels this. We’re being honest here, not promotional. Some people need the world to move at a certain pace, and that pace is reasonable and valid and this place simply won’t provide it. If you need reliable spring, if March needing to behave like March and not May (or December) is non-negotiable for your wellbeing, you should probably know that about yourself before you sign any contracts.
But if you’re someone who finds something satisfying in anticipation itself, if you’re the person who doesn’t unwrap gifts early, who lets the good thing build, who can handle a plot twist in the fourth act without losing faith in the story, then the Lakes Region spring is going to feel like something designed for you.
Because when it comes, you feel it. All of it. Every bit of what you waited for.
The mud dries. The birds arrive in a rush that feels almost aggressive after the winter quiet. The ice goes out on the lakes, which is its own small ceremony if you happen to be watching. The peepers start, and if you haven’t heard several hundred spring peepers going at full volume on a warm April night, you have a genuine experience ahead of you. The smell of the air changes in a way that is almost impossible to describe, except to say that your body registers it before your brain does.
None of this is subtle. Spring here doesn’t tiptoe in. It arrives with the energy of something that had to wait, and it brings all of that accumulated pressure with it.
We think of this as a kind of temperament test. Not a quiz. Just an honest question worth sitting with.
If the idea of a spring that is genuinely unpredictable, that might give you a 70-degree Tuesday and a snowstorm Friday, that keeps you guessing until sometime in May, feels like something being taken from you, that’s useful information. Not a flaw. Information. This seasonal rhythm asks something of you, and if what it asks feels like too much, the place probably isn’t the right fit, and it’s better to know that now than after you’ve bought a house and spent your first March in genuine despair.
If, on the other hand, you read the description above and felt something closer to recognition, if you’ve always been someone who finds the slow and unpredictable reveal satisfying, who doesn’t need constant forward momentum to feel like things are going well, who has a decent relationship with patience and can even appreciate a plot twist, then the spring here isn’t something you’ll have to make peace with. It’ll feel like home.
And if you’re not sure yet? That’s the most honest answer. Some people don’t know their own seasonal temperament until they’ve actually lived it. Neither of us did, fully, until we were in it. When Andrea moved up here from Massachusetts around 20 years ago, she didn’t think it would be that different. It is.
That’s part of why we write about this the way we do. Not to sell you on the Lakes Region. To help you figure out whether it’s actually yours.
The daffodils will be up soon. By Lakes Region standards, anyway.
And when they are, they’ll mean something. Not because daffodils are objectively more meaningful here than anywhere else, but because they will have been waited for. Because the ground will have earned them. Because you will have noticed the moment they appeared in a way that people in Nashville, with their February flowers, probably won’t.
That noticing, that small private celebration of something that took its time and kept you guessing, is a decent preview of what it feels like to live here through all four seasons.
If that sounds like something you want, keep reading. Keep paying attention. We’ll be here.
Here’s to the long wait that makes the arrival matter.
🏔️Jenn & Andrea, Keys to the Lakes
