April: Spring or Winter in Vermont?

To help celebrate Spring, we took a brief excerpt from the book Midwives: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian. We recently reviewed this book for our Book of the Month Selection. Based on our experience, this particular passage seems to ring true for Springtime in Vermont.

"April is neither wholly spring nor wholly winter in Vermont. It's common for there to be flurries -- maybe even a few inches of heavy, wet snow -- one day, and then hot sun and temperatures in the high sixties the next. The crocuses and tulips emerge, endure the schizophrenic weather about as well as everything else (they flower, they sag, they perk up and flower), blooming blue or yellow against brown grass one day, and then against green the next."

"Vermonters don't manifest their reactions to the abrupt changes in weather as dramatically as flowers, but we do feel them inside and show them outside. We might not bother to shovel our walks or plow our driveways after an April snow shower -- the snow will melt soon enough -- but we will sweep it away from the front porch or front steps, and the idea of taking a broom to sopping white blankets when the rest of the world seems well into spring makes even the most resilient among us shake our heads with disgust. And with the exception of the sugar makers hoping for one last frenzied maple sap run, as a group we all sigh when we awake and discover that our roofs were covered once more with snow as we slept: By midmorning those drapes will slide off the slate or sheet metal, rolling like avalanches down the pitch, creating snowdrifts that torment us for days."

"When the sun is strong and the air is warm, however, we shout greetings to one another down the lengths of long driveways and from the windows of our cars as we pass; we hold our heads high as we walk, staring up into the sky with our eyes shut and our faces widened by smiles. We breathe in deeply the summery air, but this sort of inhalation doesn't result in a sigh; it's a precursor to a purr, or the moans one might make during a backrub."

"We no longer mope, we no longer grouse. We are filled with energy."

If you are interested in ordering this book, it is available in our Country Bookstore: Fiction. Click on the link below to view more descriptive information, pricing and/or order Midwives: A Novel from the Amazon.com catalog.