Winter boredom reached a crescendo in my house when my kids started playing tennis in the living room. You know it has been a long winter when the kids start practicing swings indoors and bouncing balls off the wall. My son walks restlessly from room to room cradling his new racket as if it were a teddy bear. He is impatient for the start of the school’s spring tennis season.

Our indoor tennis court reminds me of the snowy weekend, years ago, when we set up the tent in the living room for the kids to sleep in. (It was the best vacation we could manage at the time.) All was fine until the tent’s metal fixtures, unadjusted to the heat of the house, broke. At least, with all these tennis balls bouncing around, we don’t have any broken windows… not yet.

This week, as temperatures warm and the melt begins, we are more than ready for a reprieve from winter. I’m starting small, just hoping for a full week of school. And while our picnic table has become a gracefully sculpted drift, I’m hoping a maroon edge will soon appear, reminding me again of its exact location.

The long line of snow-covered, plastic-wrapped hay bales at the edge of the field is shrinking as my cousin spikes up yet another bale to feed to his cattle. I’m hoping the hay will last until the cows are able to find new grass under the last patches of snow.

There is reason for spring hope in the smell of skunk and the steady drip of icicles in the sun, in the incremental increase of daylight and the yielding mud.

The conspicuousness of crows is another indicator of the changing season. Some crows migrate in winter, but many stay north, battened down during the coldest months. But now I am seeing pairs in flight and hearing their raspy caws. My mother used to say, “The backbone of winter is broken,” when she saw the first crow. Black-capped chickadees, while still abundant at the feeder, can be heard singing their spring territorial song as well—a buoyant, two-note call that says “hey sweetie” or “fee bee.”

And if there were any doubt of spring signs, the potholes and buckles in our salt-stained roads tell us that the ground is thawing, melting the furrows of winter.

I am also ready for a revival of spring hope for my neighbors and community. Up here, it has been a long winter of loss and sickness, fires and the tragic, untimely deaths of young people. We are all ready for the new birth of spring.