A Portrait Of New England In Four Seasons
Text by Charles Bramesco
Illustrations by Priya Mistry
There’s an old joke around New England about how the rest of the United States envies the region for its four distinct seasons: Pre-Winter, Winter, Still-Winter, and Road-Paving Season. Like all the best one-liners, it’s funny because it’s true. The territory spanning Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut really does offer the best of all possible climes over the course of a year, from the verdant thickets of forest to the sunbather-dotted beaches to the untouched snowbanks right out of Frost’s verses. But that gag also contains the corollary truth that, for the people actually living there, the right to complain about it all is hard-won and sacred. These are the two forces that inform life in New England—bounty and bitterness.
Winter
An unforgiving time, a disillusioning time, a punishing time. The picturesque image of quiet northern hamlets dusted with white, propagated by an entire cottage industry of postcards and mantle tchotchkes, is a lie for all but approximately ten days out of the year. (A number that’s only been slimmed by the acceleration of global warming.) The ugly actuality of a snow-sustaining biome couldn’t be further from it. The powdery consistency and bright printer-paper hue last no longer than 48 hours before starting to shrink and solidify into dark brown barricades caked with filth. Basic mobility can’t be taken for granted; though the streets may be dutifully strewn with rock salt that leaves boot-staining residue, the unique terror of a fishtailing car is well-known to all area motorists. It’s dicey even for those hoofing it, their glutes bruised from black ice slip-and-falls.
The difference between this coldness and the comparable sub-zero temperatures found in the midwestern states lies in how those experiencing the weather let it affect them. Freezing an object toughens it, and around the northeast, the people are no different. Winter is the crucible in which New Englanders are vulcanized to their nationally renowned hardiness, a spirit going back to the colonial forefathers that set upon the continent, summarily committed genocide, and went to work constructing a new world. The elements took the lives of many men in those early years, and it’s still liable to numb a nose or ear. All respect to T.S. Eliot, but January is in fact the cruelest month, the period that imbues everyone along the blustery seaboard with the on-edge attitude that’s gotten Massachusettsians labeled “Massholes” by the adjoining states.
There are, however, precious gasps of reprieve. For all of the inconvenience and despair that snow can cause once fallen, it can still inspire pure rapture so long as it’s up in the air. Pine trees dapple moonlight in such a particular fashion that if the evening’s flakes are of sufficient body, they’ll resemble a falling disco ball’s refractions as they tumble downward. Before everyone succumbs to the annual bad mood, the inclement conditions can yield heartening displays of compassion and mercy. The bond between strangers collaborating to free a car unable to gain traction on a slick street lasts for a short time, but burns hot. Most fir tree farms provide customers with complimentary mugs of hot chocolate (god willing, with a few mini marshmallows floating on top) as they peruse the Christmastime wares.
More than anything else, Yuletide illustrates the romantic appeal of what can otherwise be a forbidding ordeal. This is the province of what’s been accepted as the composed picture of Christmas, a collection of signifiers including but not limited to frosted window panes, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, cabins with smokestacks, glistening hams, and scarf-wrapped carolers.
More to the point, there’s something grotesque about imagining Santa Claus scaling a chimney in temperatures above fifty degrees Fahrenheit. New England is the only part of America where Christmas, and to a wider extent winter, makes sense.
Spring
A wet time, and as in all things, that wetness signals rebirth. The long-awaited thaw leaves the earth, once as impenetrable as granite, soft enough to sustain the onions, carrots, potatoes, and other root vegetables durable enough to survive in the nutrient-poor soil. Soon, they’ll fill the shelves at a cobweb network of farmer’s markets, where relaxed locals spend Sunday mornings planning their savory soups. The rural stretches of Vermont and New Hampshire responsible for feeding the rest of their corner of the United States blossom into a paradise of rolling green, deer wandering through backyards to nibble at clotheslines. Along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts, the fishing industry shakes off its barnacles and returns to the waves along with the legions of amateur boaters.
In the metropolitan radius, it’s hope that’s springing anew, as the Red Sox resume regulation play. More than the Celtics, Bruins, or even fanfavorite Patriots, the century-old baseball club offers an integral perspective on the mentality of their many fans. For eighty-six years, the curse allegedly placed on the hapless losers by star player Babe Ruth as he departed for the rival Yankees served as an all-encompassing metaphor. All the resentment, frustration, and battered resilience that comes with life in New England could be readily projected onto the fates of the Sox, and their ascent to league supremacy somehow hasn’t changed that. It’s a testament to the ornery nature of Red Sox country that the Chicago Cubs had run up a much longer World Series losing streak at this same time, and yet never grew identified with the sort of mass persecution complex originating at Fenway Park.
Most of what New Englanders do comes from a place of surly defiance. Even during the period in which they’re most glad to be alive, shedding the protective exoskeleton of grumpiness, any gratitude for the onset of spring starts when they say it starts. At the first sign of anything kinder than “frigid,” everyone dons their warm-weather apparel as if to prove that they won't be told what to do by a thermometer. The more willful teenage boys sport the rayon gym shorts all through winter. Were she still with us, Margaret Mead would probably be the one to pinpoint why.
The anthropology of the region feels a bit more pronounced during the month of March in particular, as Saint Patrick’s Day reignites longstanding tensions between Boston’s lrish and Italian populations. Along with Columbus Day, the most important day on the calendar for the North End neighborhood as well as Rhode Island’s capital of Providence, the two holidays draw attention to the aggressive homogeneity of New England. It’s one of the whiter pockets of the United States, and in practice, the lack of diversity can seed attitudes not quite in step with its perception as a haven of liberalism and progressivism.
Summer
A time of leisure, of getting-away. Hampshirites and Vermonters sneak off to Lake Winnipesaukee for a weekend of canoeing and trying not to brush the slimy underwater rocks with their feet while swimming. Parents create a week or three of peace and quiet by shipping their youngsters off to one of the innumerable summer camps with Algonquin names dotting Maine, where boys with crew cuts can still learn how to tie knots. Cape Cod beckons to the well-off set, Martha’s Vineyard its epicenter of wealth; those with sharp eyes might spot an obscure member of the flagging Kennedy dynasty milling about. At the very tip of Massachusetts’ easternmost curling hook sits Provincetown, a haven of culture and good-natured hedonism for the LGBTQ community.
“Explosions of foliage lure tourists known only semi-derogatorily as leaf peepers for sightseeing drives through serpentine wooded roads.”
But the beach, a space understood as an abstract every bit as broad and meaningful as “The City” in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, accommodates everyone. From the brisk waters of Maine and Massachusetts to the marginally more tolerable shores of Rhode Island and Connecticut, the beach grants the populace another opportunity to assert the stubbornness that is the source of their power. No matter how icy the surf, no matter how gritty the sand, they will turn out in droves to slather on the sunblock and frolic in the water until their toes get numb. Those further inland have to make a daylong excursion of things, but within a radius of proximity to the coastline, beaching becomes a casual afterwork activity.
Not just therapeutic, it’s also highly ritualistic, mostly in ways pertaining to food. Moms and dads will slip their offspring five bucks and they’ll be off like a shot to the refreshment hut, shaking with anticipation for an Italian-ice slushie that dyes the mouth a deep azure. The secondary cool-off treat is the Hoodsie, a canny little wax paper cup of half vanilla ice cream and half chocolate that comes packaged with its own itty-bitty wooden spoon. For lunch, it’s boiled hot dogs or, in the more upscale communities, the famed lawbstuh roll. The noble lobster confers a bit of status as a low-stakes form of conspicuous consumption; middle-class families not unlike my own would designate one night each summer as the special occasion to bring home some still-writhing crustaceans for cookouts also boasting all-important ears of sweet corn and the delicacy beef cut referred to as “sirloin tips.” Seafood cuisine gives locals a number of shibboleths by which they might weed out poseurs just passing through; even those who don’t speak in Massachusetts’ chowdery brogue know that it’s pronounced SCAH-llop, not SCA-llop.
Even so, the line about road-paving holds true; for all the emphasis on easy living, summer can be nothing more than the part of the year when one must continue doing their job, and in extreme heat. The emphasis may be on leisure, but the work doesn’t stop. For the gravel crews of Lowell and other post-industrial mill towns, it’s nevah hahdah.
Fall
A transformative time, a time for New England to ripen into its most picturesque self. Explosions of foliage lure tourists known only semi-derogatorily as leaf peepers for sightseeing drives through serpentine wooded roads, complete with intermittent stops at roadside stands peddling hot cider and the storied apple cider donut. Those willing to kill a few more hours will stroll through the orchards for apple-picking or patches of pumpkins, partaking in an affectionate burlesque of the land’s agricultural past. Gourd popularity peaks, of both the decorative and edible varieties, pumpkin in particular. No Halloween (somehow, no matter how mild the lead-up October, always a stingingly chilly night) can be complete until pies have been baked, seeds have toasted, and as of late, lattes have been spiced. In Salem, the one-time site of the hysteria-fueled trials that claimed the lives of nearly two dozen innocents, October 31 rivals Mardi Gras for unbridled weirdness and sheer excess.
Thanksgiving has true claim to the season, however, being synonymous with the imagery and aesthetics of the northeast in the same manner as Christmas. If anything, more so—Christmas may be a European creation, but this holiday’s birthplace is smack in the heart of the region at Plymouth Rock. The customary turkey, potatoes, cranberries, and other assorted treats harken back to the colonial era and the Pilgrims that made do with what they had. Fall has a way of accentuating New England’s status as the oldest West-settled area of the United States, an ineffable quality reflected in the plentiful photography of sturdy churches and farmhouses.
The Rockwellesque abounds all over, its rustic Americana inherent in the county fairs peddling fried dough of all shapes and sizes, or the schools getting back in session with marching bands and varsity football matches. It’s wholesome, or at least a welcome counterpoint to such ills as widespread opioid abuse and vanishing affordable housing that currently plague the area. All the same, it leaves us unbraced for the godless hellscape of winter soon to descend on the terrain once again. As the permafrost expands, the ground swells, almost like the planet’s breathing. Cracks open on the sidewalk. Protruding tree roots catch the wheels of bicycling kids and skin knees raw. The cycle continues anew.
