Cruelest Month

Whoever believes T.S. Eliot that April is the cruelest month has apparently never spent any substantial time in New Hampshire’s North Country. With April comes the first blast of spring, forcing green through wet corn snow, bringing animals and natives alike out of winter’s hibernation. No, April may bring late heavy storms, winds glossing branches icy over, false starts and stops to spring’s forthcoming, but it is not cruel, just impetuous.

Cruel is November, the season of undoubtable reality. Gone is the temperance of summer, short and heady through the longest days of June and July, trickling into August, when the land is green and lush, dark with vegetation, alive with the sound of fast running water and the smell of lilacs, strawberries, and fresh earth. The rocks heat metallic and shimmer off the shallows of the Connecticut and Ammonoosuc Rivers. Summer yields to the goldening of early fall, when the mountainsides patina in reverse, blending green to gold. The difficult fertility of gardening on granite yields a bounty smaller than that of our southern and western neighbors, but what we produce is sweet, ripe, and vibrant. Days start and end crisp, but warm to intoxicating highs. The air hangs heavy with the smell of apples and second cut hay, fields being tilled and readied for the next season’s life. Time lingers as the trees complete their metamorphosis, and we all hold our breath in wonder of the potency of color and light. The sun sets amber over the hills, sooner than we might light, but with a spectacular quality we imbibe.

But then, as the last leaves fall to the turn of November, darkness comes too early and stays too late like a house guest with poor etiquette. The last vestiges of warmth leave the air, the soil, the rocks, and we’re left with grey- grey skies, grey rock, grey trees. The flushed, ruddy cheeks of apple picking and wood stacking turn goose-fleshed and sallow against the bitter wind. The stores are in, feed and wood, and heavy blankets taken from their closets. Affable summer smiles and leisurely chats give ‘way to hurried snippets beneath upturned collars. Necks shrink and eyes turn to slits. Spring is too far off to remember clearly. It hangs in the consciousness like a benign ghost. The hardscrap that is the North Country begins to show beneath the pretense that we are just like any other place. And now, with November, begins the questioning: Do we have enough? Are we really ready for the coming snow and cold? The ground hardens into dormant muddy ruts, awaiting the baptism of snow that is later and later in coming to ease the apprehension and cover the starkness of doubt.