What May Asks of You
Ready? Or Getting Ready?
There’s a difference between ready and getting ready. May lives in that gap.
Not fully open yet. Not still closed. The farm stands are starting to set up their signs again, hand-lettered on plywood, leaning at the end of driveways. The boat launches are clearing. The mud that made the back roads feel personal, like they were selecting who got through, has started to firm up. The light is so long now it catches you off guard in the evening, still pale and bright at 7:30 when something in your body keeps expecting dark.
This is what May asks of you. Not arrival. Orientation.
If you've been here through early spring, you already know what this moment is.
This is what we’ve been calling Locals Season — the stretch from ice-out to Memorial Day when the Lakes Region belongs entirely to itself. The ski areas have closed. The summer camps are still shuttered. The roads are just starting to recover from mud season. It’s the particular window when the parking lots are manageable and the trails are yours and nothing is performing itself for anyone yet.
May is where Locals Season hands things off. Not abruptly. Gradually. Something in the pace shifts from inward to anticipatory. The question stops being will winter end and starts being what will spring actually ask of us.
People who arrive in June for the first time every summer love it here. Of course they do. The light on the water in June is almost unfair in its beauty. The lupine are still going along the roadsides. The air smells like something green and growing and recently washed. Summer in the Lakes Region is genuinely, objectively spectacular, and we wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.
But May feels different if you were here in February.
The farm stand egg sign at the end of a road you drove past for three dark months. The evening you notice the peepers have started, that high, urgent chorus coming up from the wetlands at dusk. The day the dock goes back in and the lake stops looking like a photograph of itself and starts looking like a place that people inhabit again. These things land differently when you’ve been waiting for them. Not impatiently. Just... attentively. The way you wait for something you trust is coming even when you can’t see it yet.
May is the proof that it was worth it.
We don’t think enough people talk honestly about what the transition actually feels like.
There’s a version of the spring narrative that’s all relief and celebration. The Instagram version, where everyone is paddleboarding and the flowers are out and the captions say things like “FINALLY” in all caps. And sure. There’s some of that.
But May also has a quality that’s harder to name. A kind of attentiveness that the busier months don’t quite allow for. You’re viscerally aware, in May, of things you’ll stop noticing by July. The exact moment the osprey comes back to the nest on the platform at the edge of the lake. The way the light changes as the leaves start to fill in and the afternoon shadows get longer and more complicated. The first kayak of the year, when the water is still cold enough that you’re aware of exactly how close you are to it and every sprinkle from the paddle makes you feel more alive.
Memorial Day is ahead. The summer people will come, and we genuinely want them here. The region needs them, economically and spiritually, because a place that only ever sees itself in its quiet mode loses something too. The energy that arrives in June is real. The kid shrieking off the dock at the public beach, the traffic on 16 on a Saturday, the line at the Bailey’s Bubbles in Wolfeboro. All of it part of the thing.
But right now, in May, there’s still space. Space to be watching for the transition before it transitions fully.
If you’re thinking about the Lakes Region from a distance, this is the month that rewards paying attention.
Not because it’s the prettiest. It isn’t, quite, not yet. Some years there’s still a patchy remnant of snow on the north faces of the hills into the first week of May. The roadsides go through an awkward phase, brown and matted, before the green takes over. Mud season leaves its mark.
But what May has is this: the before.
The before of the lake filling with boats. The before of the reservations becoming hard to get and the parking lots becoming difficult. The before of summer, which is a whole other kind of beautiful.
People who know the Lakes Region in May know something about it that the summer people might never realize. They know how it wakes up. They know what it looks like in the early hours of itself, before it's fully arrived.
That knowledge is worth something. Not just practically. Something harder to describe. The knowing that you've seen this place in its quieter moods, not just the showstopper that is late June.
We’ve been watching Mays for a while now. Each one a little different. Some years it comes in all at once and you blink and it’s gone. Some years it’s drawn out, slow and cool and generous, giving you weeks of the in-between. This year it feels like the latter, so far.
The lake is open. The peepers are put on a show every evening. The farm stands are coming back to life one by one.
Getting ready isn’t the same as ready. But it’s its own thing, worth slowing down for.
Here’s to the in-between.
🧭 Jenn & Andrea, Keys to the Lakes
P.S. If you’re curious about what it actually means to live here across the seasons, we’re doing a talk at the Meredith Public Library on May 5th. It’s informal, it’s free, and it’s exactly the kind of conversation we like best. Come find out if the Lakes Region is your kind of place.
