Thoughts and a NYT Reblog: Spring Awakening

It's been a week now since the first day of Spring, and this reflection by Melissa Kirsch from The New York Times has stayed with me:

image by María Jesús Contreras

Today is the first full day of spring. Can you feel it? In the Northeast, it was mostly cold and rainy this week, and one could only repeat “In like a lion, out like a lamb” and check the weather apps again. We’re technically in Spring of Deception, according to a meme that posits 12 actual seasons, based on experience rather than science. (Next up is Third Winter, followed by The Pollening.)

Even so, once the equinox passes, the good weather bias begins. We increasingly expect warmer days, note the early perennials sending up their shoots in flower beds still pocked with snow. We underdress optimistically when the temperature grazes heights not seen since fall.

I’m too eager, a spring-summer dogmatist wishing it Memorial Day so fervently I overlook the grass greening. I miss commuters’ coffee cups transitioning from hot to iced, the gradual unbuttoning and disappearance of coats. My friend Austin remarked that the seasons are one of the few things left we can’t change on demand — they take as long as they take and there’s no app or hack to speed their progress. He meant this as a good thing.

And he’s right, of course. These early technically spring days, with their absurd cold gusts and flashes of pale sun, are still days. They still contain 24 hours to inhabit, even if I wish I were inhabiting them in shorts. Anticipation is tricky: It feels exciting to look forward to something, but often that looking forward results in overlooking what’s right here. Right here, just on the other side of the equinox, daylight now exceeds dark in the Northern Hemisphere. Each day, sunset is a little bit later.

“What is all this juice and all this joy?” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem “Spring.” Indeed, what is it? What’s with the dampness of sidewalks, the smell of the thawing earth? Are there more birds singing or am I just waking up to them? They’re the tiny increments of spring arriving. The equinox is a planetary demarcation, but real-life spring arrives gradually, a halting, nonlinear progression. Residue of winter, hints of future summer, doubling back before settling into itself, a season getting its footing, finally, eventually, again.

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I've been in Ohio for five years now, and I understand spring here less than I do winter. Today it was over 80 degrees, and tomorrow it will be 40 degrees lower. I've had a sinus infection and ear infection since the end of spring break, which was the first week of March. I still can't hear well out of my left ear, which has not cleared once. When I'm talking or walking in the wind, my right ear closes up as well, going in and out like my FM stations on the half hour drive out to campus. I hear myself breathing like I'm underwater with a snorkel.

As a Floridian, I can't stand this. I can't tolerate the indecision. I need to keep a full coat in my car for when I inevitably forget what it's like outside my apartment. Or when, more likely, I think I understand and then get caught in a gust of wind and cry--literally cry--on the way to my classes.

The other time I usually cry is the first time I see a robin for the year. I never understand why they appear when they do since it will inevitably snow at least nine times yet before levelling out. But it's at least announcing that the idea of spring has come. And I wouldn't be much of an English professor if I didn't believe ideas carry great meaning--sometimes more than reality.

April is next week, but I still find it hard to hope for too much yet. Eliot says "April is the cruellest month" for a reason. It's supposed to rain all next week over the Easter weekend. I've recently found a farm near my place that lets you come and interact with all the animals you want. I went and found a curry comb and brush in the barn with the cats and chickens, and then I was out brushing the cows, ponies, and donkeys for so long that someone thought I volunteered there. I'd never been happier. With the rain, it'll turn into a swamp again.

Like Kirsch, I long for true spring (read: summer) in a near maniacal way. Truly desperate. My students know how much I hate the winter. How sick I get--literally and figuratively. I'm a solar battery, I tell them. Without the sun, I literally wilt. And the sun here, even when it's full force, isn't even half the sun I'm used to closer to the equator. I have an electric plug adaptor for the cigarette lighter in my car just so I can plug in a sun light to keep above the gear shift when I drive. You're supposed to sit in front of those things for half an hour in the morning, but I don't even have time for breakfast when I get up. There's no way I can make my students understand: there is no reason at all, period, for the sun to not be out unless it's night time or it's storming. Ohio is slowly killing me.

I long for a week where it stays above 75 degrees for all seven days. I long for sunshine I can feel, that isn't covered by clouds of haze. I long for people to be out in the neighborhood and in the grass, for the apartment pool to be open (pools closing at all is also a new phenomenon). I miss the smell of grass. I miss needing my sunglasses. I miss my flip flops.

Most of all, I miss feeling like myself. All the patience in the world can't help me wait for that. Like Kirsch says, too much looking forward to what's coming can lead to overlooking what's already here. So each spring day of mystery is another day to be present with no matter what's there. I may never get better at that. And that's okay, too.

Each day now, there's a little more daylight to help me try.