The Season That Doesn’t Make the Brochures
Local's Season is Ending and Summer is Arriving
A short note: You may notice I'm writing as "I" now. Andrea and I remain colleagues and friends, and we've each moved to independent practice. The work, this place, and the commitment to help people find their place within it continue unchanged.
The brochures skip Spring entirely.
They go straight from ice-out — the dramatic image of open water, the symbolic exhale — to July. The sparkle of Winnipesaukee on a perfect afternoon. The packed marina at Weirs Beach. The painted houses in Alton Bay. The sunsets on Great East Lake. The version of here that photographs well and travels far and makes people in their city apartments close their laptops and say we should really do something about that.
Spring here doesn’t photograph well. Not in the way that’s useful for a brochure or your Insta feed. It’s overcast more than it’s clear. It’s cold when it should be warming. The lilacs bloom and then it rains for four days straight and you wonder if they’ll survive it, and they do, but that is not the story anyone is telling. The black flies arrive right on schedule. The dirt roads are a mess until they aren’t. Mud season technically ends in April but mud doesn’t always get the memo. Yesterday I made it a mile down a dirt road I’ve taken dozens of times before giving up and turning around lest I get stuck in the mire.
And yet.
May is the month that belongs to the people who chose this place honestly. Not for its best light, not for its July self, but for what it actually is.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: the seasons here are teachers. Spring is the most particular one. It doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It doesn’t bathe you in sun and warmth and greens and blues. It does what it does — cold mornings that have no business being cold in the third week of May, rain that settles in for a Tuesday and doesn’t leave until Friday, windows where the sun comes out hard and brilliant and the lake goes silver-blue and you think there it is, before the clouds close back in.
What spring asks of you is a kind of faith. Not in the optimistic, inspirational-poster sense. Just the plain willingness to believe it’s happening even when the weather is doing its best to suggest otherwise.
Here’s what May gives back, if you’re paying attention.
The peepers. If you’ve never heard the peepers come up in full voice on a warm night — and warm here in early May means somewhere in the 50s, the kind of night that warrants a sweatshirt — you haven’t fully understood this place yet. It’s not quiet. It’s the opposite of quiet. It’s the sound of ten thousand small creatures announcing that winter is over, whether the weather cooperates or not. It arrives before the leaves are fully out and before the tourists arrive and it’s entirely, specifically ours.
The light in the mornings. Before the green canopy fills in, the light comes through differently. It’s the light of a place still waking up, still showing its bones. You can see sightlines through the woods that will close off entirely by June. If you’ve ever pulled into a scenic view parking lot and thought, “what view?” that one was designed for May and the locals. The mountains look different. Cleaner. The lake reflects things it won’t reflect once the leaves are thick. There’s a two-week window, maybe three, where you see the landscape the way it looked before anyone built on it, or close enough.
The restaurants that just reopened. The ones that went to winter hours in November and are finally back, or back to full schedule, or trying something new with the spring menu before the summer pace sets in. There’s something good about being in a dining room that’s not yet at capacity, where the kitchen is still finding its rhythm, where the owner comes out to the floor because they have time to. It’s a version of this place most summer visitors will never see.
The lake before it’s busy. This is the one that’s hardest to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Winnipesaukee on a quiet May morning is a different body of water than it is on a Saturday in August. Not better and not worse. Different in a way that matters. You can hear your own paddle. A loon surfaces thirty feet off the kayak and looks at you with that particular loon expression — mild indignation, a little regal — and then dives. You could have been anyone. You could have been no one. The lake doesn’t care. It’s doing what it does, whether you witness it or not.
What’s the key thing to know about spring in the Lakes Region? It is not a season you hold onto, it’s one you pass through. It knows what comes next. It’s been doing this long enough.
This past weekend was Memorial Day. Cold, rainy, the kind of weather that makes you wonder if the calendar made a clerical error. Sunday morning you’d have been forgiven for thinking nothing was open and no one was coming.
And then the sun came out for a few hours Monday afternoon.
The boat traffic on Winnipesaukee was the heaviest I’ve seen yet, and nothing like whats to come. Boats the way you count them in May is nothing like how you count them in July. In a month it will be wakes crossing wakes. The whole spread of the lake doing what the whole spread of the lake does.
This morning, I circled the same block in Wolfeboro three times looking for a parking spot and finally found one. The town was alive the way it gets before it’s officially alive — half the people in hoodies and pants and half in sundresses and shorts and flip flops, contractors finishing their spring work, the harbor waiting to be full.
Last night my oldest and I passed through and saw the telltale signal that locals season is behind us: twenty people in line outside Bailey’s Bubbles at 7:30 pm, waiting for ice cream in fleeces and light jackets, a few of them still holding umbrellas from earlier in the day. Because it was Memorial Day weekend and that is what you do.
Spring is handing over the baton.
Not dramatically. Not in the clean, ceremonial way a brochure might suggest. In the way things actually transition here: while it is still cold, while there is still mud on a few back roads, while the black flies are still making their presence known on the shaded trails and sneaking into your house when someone holds a door open for a fraction of a second. Summer doesn’t wait for spring to finish here. Spring doesn’t wait for permission to let go. They overlap for a while, the way the seasons always do here, and now, day by day, the math will start to shift.
Spring is the season most worth understanding, I think. Not because it’s the hardest (that’s a first winter, and that’s its own conversation). But because it’s the most honest.
It will not perform for you. It will not produce a perfect day on request. It will give you exactly what it has, which some weeks is mud and cold and the stubborn refusal to be warm, and some weeks is morning light through bare maples and loon calls and coffee on the dock when the water is still and the air smells like something waking up.
Both are what you sign up for if you choose to call this place home.
Both are worth it.
Here’s to May. The season before the season. The one the brochures skip and the locals keep for ourselves, mostly.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
