Just the kind of spring I've wanted

May 25, 2025

In a month we’ll have lived here for a full year and the firsts will be over. First summer, first fall, first winter and now spring.

For all these firsts I’ve had nothing to compare them to, except Montreal where we used to live. One of these years I’ll have enough lived knowledge of this place to make intra vs. inter region comparisons.

According to the locals and the meteorologists it’s been a cooler than average spring.

This last week was especially chilly and we’ve had three, or is it four? overcast, cool, and rainy weekends in a row.

But this is exactly what I expected from temperate, coastal Nova Scotia.

We don’t live right on the coast, we’re upriver aways, about a 10 minute drive from the ocean and in that short distance the temperature change or change in the “feels like” temperature is notable. We’re also tucked into the woods and it’s significantly less windy at the house than it is even where our driveway meets the highway.

All that to say, I haven’t found the spring any colder, wetter, windier, or greyer than I was expecting in moving here. As I’ve written and talked about in my videos I anticipated a long, drawn out spring season and it’s been pretty much exactly that.

I thought it might the hardest season for me, an interminable spring. But that’s not how it’s felt.

I’ve loved this spring. Rainy weekends and all. I wonder is this still the first year in a new place honeymoon? Maybe. First year of empty nest honeymoon? Also, maybe.

In both the natural and human constructed world, in the North American context at least, a lot happens in spring. There’s even a word for it. Maycember. (I’m late to the party, as I often am, in picking up that term.)

I wrote a bit about the cultural end-of-school-year related busyness that is Maycember in this recent blog post. And how thrilled I am (I might not have used the exact word thrilled in that post, but that’s how I feel) to no longer be in a season of life with so many springtime cultural, specifically scholastic, obligations.

A little aside: I think Maycember as describing May specifically and not spring cultural energy generally applies more to the United States where the K-12 school year ends earlier than the typical Canadian schedule of mid to late June. Even so, May seems really busy for Canadian families also.

As an eager observer and participant in the natural world and as a gardener, spring is full enough without all the rest of it. Like I talked about in that earlier post, I question “all the rest of it” as it compounds the stress for families especially, adding to the rat race feel of people’s everyday lives and forcing them (us) to participate in the common religion of consumerism even more so than we already do.

For every event and activity things must be purchased, from cards to outfits, etc… I find capitalist-mediated cultural obligations emotionally and financially stressful and exhausting and I am always at a loss for why we all go along with it.

Sorry (not sorry) I thought I had laid down the burden of all my cultural curmudgeon-ness in my last post, but I guess not.

What was I saying?… Ah yes, gardening and the natural world.

Some of my favorite YouTube channels are from Scandinavia. (Stay with me here.) And their winters are spectacularly beautiful (and hella long). You may recall that I love winter and so there is some envy and maybe even ancestral longing from my own Scandinavian and northern European roots for these wintery wonderlands.

And while it’s true that video format story telling inherently compresses time, where weeks of recordings can be edited into 2 minutes, spring is basically a blink in these northern lands, fast and furious.

Winter one week. Summer two weeks later. Spring, the seven days in-between. Blink and you miss it.

Springs are unique to the places in which they occur. And this is my first year experiencing spring on this land, in this corner of the world.

Spring’s trajectory, starting late March and still going strong two months later, has been all kinds of conditions and temperatures, within the spring range - snows in the early part of the season, lots of rain, some really warm days, lots of chilly ones, grey for days at a time, sunny and blue skies at other times. And of course, coastal fog.

This was exactly the kind of spring weather I was anticipating in moving here. But what I wasn’t expecting was the contentedness I feel with the slow transition.

I’ve been pondering why I have enjoyed this long and coolish spring, contrary to what I expected to feel.

I think it’s because there’s more time to notice things instead of feeling bewildered by the pace of spring transformations and transition.

Observing the deciduous trees that surround the open spaces of our property as they slowly move through bloom and bud, that stage where the trees look fuzzy from a distance, has been a particular delight for me.

The changes are subtle and nearly imperceptible at first. The trees appear bare as the earth warms and the daffodils bloom. But as sunny days intersperse with cool and rainy ones, all green things gain momentum and if you hadn’t been paying attention all along you might find yourself thinking, “wow, those leaves just came outta’ nowhere”.

But they didn’t just come out of nowhere. And our slow spring gives you time to witness the transformation, if you choose to.

I’ve asked myself is it the slow season that has given me time to witness the leaves? Or is it this spectacular window? Yes.

Even so, there’s still so much I have missed out on observing and noting. So much I long to learn and know.

Transformation unfurls at an unparalleled rate in spring and even with a floor to ceiling window on the world it’s more than I can attend to and take in.

I soothe the disappointment of not being able to witness it all with the statistically reasonable hope that I will have many more springs to observe and notice the land beyond my living room view.

Spring’s energy draws me to the river, and no longer the woods as was the pull in winter, for my regular-ish walks. And it’s an entirely different experience out here, along the water.

The estuarial river air sometimes smells briny, resonating in some primal olfactory place, which is curious to me as I was raised in the prairie-parkland of central Alberta, nowhere near the ocean.

There are no overhead trees to dapple the light, and there’s more wind. There are new plants to learn and others to be remembered.

The soft pink, white, and purple blossoms of the native and naturalized trees and shrubs in the ditch demand to be noticed and known. Their scent and show makes it hard for me to stay on task, which is to get some much-needed, heart-pumping exercise into my otherwise sedentary work day.

Attention-seeking blossoms make some plants easier to identify, the familiar homestead apple, the polyonymous service berry, and the wet woods-loving Canada rosebay.

I am longing to make acquaintances with all the flora along this river. And disappointed that most of what I see still remains name-less to me as I speed by, arms pumping.

A slow spring feels like an expansion or gift of time in a world where the fast rate of change can feel destabilizing.

Spring is a busy activity season and I have definitely needed to pace myself through its intensity. Culturally-mediated busyness aside, the natural world and the impetus to garden is fullness enough this time of year.

But paradoxically, in this climate and perhaps, in this year especially, there is a drawn out slowness to the natural intensity of the season allowing me to witness and notice through the fullness. Instead of arriving, at the other side, stressed, exhausted and feeling like spring passed me by.

I’ve had those years. I’ve recorded them on my blog. And as I suspected, the intensity of the spring season was as much owing to the demands of raising teenagers as it was to the swiftness to the Montreal spring transition where the baby green leaves only lasted days.

I don’t miss those spring experiences.

Here’s an excerpt from my 2019 spring recovery blog post, I need a summer.

What I want… is time to notice, time to stop and savor. Time in the woods… Time to rediscover my sense of wonder. I want to feel like I’ve stepped off the busy-train, that I have some agency in my life to make that choice.

Maybe that alone explains why I have loved this spring. I get to live the kind of spring season I have been longing to experience, for years.

I’ll take it. I’ll take as many expansive spring seasons as my life allows.

And seeing how previous years’ spring longings have come true, I am very hopeful that my current desire to know the land and to make the acquaintance of the flora within heart-pumping walking distance of my home will be realized in the years to come with the time, wonder, and agency this place and stage of life has gifted me.

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