Month In Spring Exclusive -

So here is to the middle child of spring. Here is to the month that cannot make up its mind. Here is to the puddles and the crocuses, the wood frogs and the phoebes, the green haze on the hillsides and the last, stubborn patches of snow in the north-facing ditches.

Go outside. The door is open. The mud is deep. And the world, for the first time in months, is waking up. month in spring

You notice it in the evening. Suddenly, dinner is not eaten in darkness. Suddenly, there is time for an after-supper walk. The world stays open longer. Porch lights come on later. There is a sense, in the last week of April, that winter is finally, truly, behind us. The dogwoods explode in white and pink. The redbuds set the roadsides on fire. The air smells of cut grass and damp earth and something else—something that might be hope. We do not just survive April. We earn May. The lilacs will come, and the irises, and the peonies heavy with ants and scent. The tomatoes will go in the ground, and the corn will rise, and the light will turn syrupy and golden. But none of that happens without April. None of that happens without the rain and the mud and the false starts. None of that happens without the willingness to plant seeds in cold soil and trust that the world knows what it is doing. So here is to the middle child of spring

To live through April is to witness a resurrection in slow motion. Go outside in early April. Listen. What do you hear? Not the full-throated chorus of summer, but something more tentative: a single robin testing a phrase, the creak of a thawing branch, the rush of snowmelt turning roadside ditches into temporary creeks. The ground itself seems to exhale. After months of iron-hard frost, the soil softens, becomes spongy underfoot. Mud season, the locals call it in the north country. But mud is just water and earth remembering how to love each other again. Go outside

There is a peculiar magic to the month that sits squarely in the middle of spring. Not the shy, hesitant beginning of March, where winter still keeps a cold hand on the landscape. Not the lush, confident fullness of May, when leaves are fully out and the world has gone green and drowsy. No—the true heart of the season belongs to April.

April gardening is an act of faith. You put peas in the cold ground because the book says you can. You plant potatoes on Good Friday because your grandmother always did. You have no guarantee of success. The ground might freeze again. A late snow might crush everything. But you do it anyway. Because April is not the month of results. It is the month of trying . Here is the secret of April: the days are getting longer at their fastest rate of the year. Each morning, the sun rises a minute and a half earlier. Each evening, it sets a minute and a half later. By the end of the month, we have gained nearly three hours of light. Three hours!