One of our local, weekly newspapers is the Midcoast Beacon. My favorite section is when they ask a question to a random group of people and publish one sentence answers. This week’s question was “How do you know when it’s really spring?” The answers I liked best were from Belfast residents. Dick Berry answered “The sun gets warmer, and the robins appear.” Alessandra Martinelli said “When I can go outside without putting on more clothes.” and Cheryl Morin said “When my cats go outside for more than five minutes.”

In the interest of truth, I must confess that March and April are my least favorite months in Maine.  Actually they are the only two months I’d really like to escape to most anywhere else in the world.  The truth from my perspective is that we have four seasons: Summer, Fall, Winter and Mud.

We’re in the middle of Mud right now.  So with my expectations very low, I stop complaining when it’s over 40 degrees first thing in the morning (no frozen water buckets for the goats please) and the cold wind stops blowing every afternoon, giving me a chance to take off the wool hat I always seem to have pulled over my ears.

But, there are clear benefits to April;  Spring is here when Brambles (the little goat) sheds his gorgeous cashmere wool, Neeshee (the big goat) starts to pirouette with glee when we go for a walk (and he’s not dodging deep snow drifts) and the crocus are adding cheer to the edges of the woods…yesterday filled the criteria.

The goats and I went down to the beach where they could munch the seaweed and I could soak up a bit of sun while we watched a distant sailboat navigating into Castine.  Again, I am grateful that we don’t have mudflats in front of the campground so walking out during low tide is always easy for me and “the herd”…it was a good day…Happy Weekend everyone.