A North Country April is not for sissies. The fainthearted pack up and flee to greener lands; the tough stick it out — and those who, for various reasons, are unable to leave.

In town, the streets are deserted, restaurants closed, pedestrians absent. In the woods, the landscape has turned from dazzling white to faded brown. Mud oozes up to slime the trails. The sky is gray. Lake ice retreats … refreezes … then retreats again. Dismal as it is, we grit our teeth and tell each other, “We can do this.” We will not let mercurial April get us down. The stubbornly optimistic turn up in shorts as if to force a change in the weather. Never mind that it’s below freezing and their legs are covered with goose bumps. After all, spring is coming, they claim. The question is when? Late April, May, June, July? Can we endure till then?

To give us hope, a few balmy days are sprinkled between the blasts of cold and unwelcome snow. On these occasional days of warmth, we rush outside to turn our puffy pale faces to that rare visitor: the sun.

We dig walking shoes out from the dark depths of closets and wish crampons good riddance, tossing them aside to finally stride outdoors without worry of slipping and falling. In fact, if we stay on the dry roads, footing is so secure we can afford to raise our eyes and look around. Out on the lake, a flash of white alerts us to a pair of returning mergansers. Mallards swim nearby. A song sparrow in the alder bursts into song. Amazing. And if we watch along the roadsides, we might find the first yellow blossoms of coltsfoot daring to put in an appearance. Meltwater gurgles in the ditches. Something brown scuttles through the leaves: snowshoe hare? We are full of joy … but maybe too soon.

The following day, the temperature drops, snow blasts back into our lives and we retreat inside, cursing the damned white stuff, the cold, the northern climes. We sip an extra special cup of coffee by a roaring fire, as it it were winter, not spring, while wondering when the storm will ever end and if we have to pay the plowman to come back yet again and where the song sparrow will find food and what fool would ever choose to live here. We have been warned to take down our bird feeders on the assumption that frisky bears are waking up and looking for easy handouts. Ha! I doubt they are. If I were a bear, I would head right back to my cave and sleep through all this misery.

Suddenly, a day later, the mercury climbs high, a flock of robins congregates in the yard and the snowbank melts so low we can finally get to our Christmas lights and take them down. The sky is blue instead of our spirits. A warm breeze beckons us outside to inhale the pleasures of a northern spring. Wood frogs are clattering in a vernal pool. In forests, the first pink-striped spring beauties lift up their blossoms, and in gardens, daffodils and crocuses appear even as hats, coats and gloves disappear. Delighting in the hot sun, we forget the recent weeks to ask ourselves: Why would anyone want to live anywhere else but here?

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Caperton Tissot is a writer and a year-round resident of Saranac Lake.