LOCALadk Magazine

It was one of the first warm days in March in the Adiron- dacks. Olin and I were skiing, shedding layers…the sun turning the snow into wet slush, the sun warming our faces. We're grateful for this al- most-spring-feeling ski day. But suddenly it hits me, almost like someone is slamming a door, leaving me on the other side: this could be our last ski day of the season. Immediately, I start to panic, feeling like I somehow let an entire winter season pass by without ever taking a moment to stop and let it soak in. May- be I was too worried the whole time about cold toes, backup mittens, and running noses to stop and appreciate it. I grab Olin and erratically declare, "Let's make these runs our best." He smiles cheekily and races ahead, clearly not under- standing the urgency of the situation. Living in the Adirondacks means shifting back and forth between wild seasonal chang- es. Every few months we rein- vent ourselves. What we eat, where we go, what we wear, and what we do. The shift from winter to spring in the Adiron- dacks is quite…wet. Especially with kids. Their rubber hollow footwear covered in mud with soggy soles adorn my entryway. The Ooaki suits drip on the hooks (more on those later). The somehow sandy puddles of water fill even the farthest reaches of my home. I also blame the dogs. Don't even get me started on the rife, soggy Adirondack spring- time dog and how it should be renamed an entirely dif- ferent kind of animal. That's it. We covered it. Spring in the ADK is wet and muddy. However, these articles are Adirondack love stories no-matter how hard these in-home puddles are to love. Therefore, I can confirm there is only one way to beat a wet Adirondack spring: it is to join it. This means spending a lot of time being really wet. We take hikes to waterfalls, like Cascade Falls here in Eagle Bay, to see the wildly flowing water. We bram- ble through the soggy mossy forest and make fairy homes behind our house. We tap trees, boil sap, and start lots of wet bonfires that struggle to cling to life. But our personal favorite is treasure hunting. The san- dy beaches surrounding our local lakes have receding water hairlines until the dams are opened. This leaves wide open spaces of shoreline to explore. We collect "ancient" glass pieces, edges softened by waves. We walk out on shallow thin layers of ice and play "Polar Bear," a weight-on-ice game that my husband Devlin always loses. The usually submerged driftwood logs are sunken pirate ships. The boys adorn them with heavy rocks, AK A "treasure", to seek out later in the summer when it returns to its water grave. We plunk rocks through ice, follow bunny tracks, and ultimately head home with pants soaked well to the waist, bellies full of water dumped out at the car, and pockets full of rocks that I find in the dryer later. It's such a wet mess. But it's our precious wet mess. In these moments, it's very easy to feel like we are just "passing time" or simply making "the best" of it. But as soon as the lakes fill with water, our once secluded spots we had to ourselves have other busy visitors, and the buzz of summer is upon us. My hope for this spring is that we all soak in those moments. That we curse the sandy wet house puddles a little less. And from the very start of our treasure hunting days, I tell the boys, "Let's make THIS our best day" every single day while we wait for the next beau- tiful season to join us.

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