It's not that I don't appreciate green grass and dandelions and being able to hang out the laundry and hearing the chatter of birds (that aren't crows or gulls or pheasants). Oh, no--they're every bit as relished as they ever were.
- Fiddlehead ferns in the produce department at the grocery store
- The local lobster fleet heading out of port
- Klatches of pheasants no longer hanging around our front door
- Clam-shacks opening for business
- The almost impossible blue of the ocean on sunny days
- News that multi-kilometer-long chunks of ice are no longer threatening to dam up the rivers
- The lack of reports about ferry routes or the Confederation Bridge being closed off
- The DNR fretting--and rightly so--about anglers catching the wrong (i.e. farmed) kind of salmon in the rivers
Mind you, the up-tick of traffic in an already-bottlenecked Shediac downtown is not at all welcome during my grocery run. That's when I have to remind myself that maybe it wouldn't be there at all if not for the shot in the fiscal arm that is tourist season. All the same, I don't envy a town whose population jumps from 5K to 30K in the course of a few weeks.
And I don't care for the way the stretch of Highway 530 in front of the old boulangerie (bakery) turns into a "kidneys are overrated" washboard, I suppose. (Yes, I remember frost-heaving in the roads back in WI, but it turns out there's an appreciable difference between sand and clay.)
I'm told that spring returns to l'Acadie later than in my stomping grounds of the Upper Midwest. True, we're compensated somewhat in the form of a cooler summer and later autumn. Alas, it still makes for a lot of impatience on my part--even without snow in the waning days of April. But, happily, it seems that Grande-Digue may even be ready to greet its guests and part-time denizens by Memorial Day.
