Where I was raised, April was considered one of the summer months. For my April birthday each year, I received bathing suits and flip flops; my birthday parties were held at the beach, and if you didn’t have your hair in a ponytail you would get so hot from hair on your neck that you would very nearly come close to experiencing internal combustion.

But then I moved to New England as an adult, of my own free will, and came face to face with the fact that April is one of the most indecisive and maddening months that you are going to find in a calendar. It is really a whole month that asks waaaay too much of people: patience and gratitude for such measly small things, like the petal of one yellow crocus poking through a pile of brown leaves so frozen you could stub your toe on it.

I don’t have that kind of patience. I didn’t get the gene for weather gratitude. After five long months of cold weather, I feel I am owed some sunshine and some green grass, at the very least. I need an end to what my friend Diane calls “stick season.” Never mind being grateful for the fact that it is no longer threatening to snow every single day, just on occasion now–I NEED LEAVES.

But this year I have noticed something has changed for me. Last night my husband and I were driving along after dark, and there came that noise that either means you have stumbled into the soundtrack of a science fiction movie, or else…the peepers are out. I grabbed his cell phone and started calling friends up to report the news, while he stared at me in disbelief.

“THE PEEPERS ARE HERE! THE PEEPERS ARE HERE!”

Peepers turn out to be little frogs that nobody ever sees because they only come out at night, and it is hard to describe the sound that peepers make if you haven’t ever heard it. It isn’t a peeping, exactly, or even a croaking. No noise you would ever ascribe to frogginess. It sounds almost ominous, like anxious chirrrrping–loud and off-key. A bunch of crickets out on a rampage, perhaps–with some horror movie suspense music thrown in. You expect to see Alfred Hitchcock stepping out from behind a tree. 

But when you have about had it with the fact that the grass everywhere you look is the color of hay, and that there is still a pile of stubborn brown speckled ice near the mailbox, the sound of the peepers can make you want to drop and kiss the ground.

Because–this is very important–my friend Karen told me that PEEPERS WILL NOT COME OUT UNTIL THERE IS NO MORE CHANCE OF FROST.

Peepers know. They are not dumb, nor are they suicidal. And if they have ventured out of hybernation, winter is done for. You can take that to the bank, Karen said.

Sure enough, by this afternoon, it was 50 degrees and the yard was already beginning to turn just the lightest shade of green. You had to look hard to see it, but I noticed it was definitely greener than it had been the day before. Buds are coming out on some of the sticks growing here and there. The forsythia has little yellow bits of promise on it.

Okay, so it’s MONTHS until bathing suits and flip flops…but today, just seeing the little bits of green and knowing that it won’t freeze again, I thought for a fleeting moment that this may be the first year I can be patient through the changes. Maybe, with the peepers’ reassurance, I can wait this month out without stomping around and wanting to throw things. I’m willing this year to try…

But the weather report I just listened to predicted snow for the end of the week. So here’s what I need to now know: Take a good look at that guy in the picture. Can he and five billion of his friends possibly be wrong about spring?