Spring:
The least-reliable season!
Not much of a marketing slogan, I guess, but it has the ad-vantage of capturing Spring’s peek-a-boo nature. Now, gentle zephyrs smell of new growth and the sun actually warms; now, rain sleets down from leaden skies and there is no warmth in us.
Gray infuses all.
Confused precipitation
waffles. Rain? Sleet? Snow?
Is the precipitation really confused or does it just lack the courage of its convictions? Without getting into character analysis/assassination, I’m prepared to give Spring a bit of a break here. False starts can be heartbreaking but it has never truly failed: Spring always arrives.
If you, Lord, kept a record of false starts,
Lord, who could stand?
– Psalm 130:3, paraphrased
So let’s try again.
Spring:
Down, sometimes — OK, often — but never out.
Not a good slogan, but not a bad target.
Budding leaves shrink back
Winter not yet in retreat
Ah! The sun again
Perhaps spring is a sitting-on-the-fence kind of season.
Jim T
Jim T – 🙂 Yes.
You have to cast your mind back to winter to appreciate spring. Why rush towards summer? I shrink from revisiting winter. I am happy enough to have survived another one. But I do not entirely forget. Indeed, spring snow ensures that I cannot. “See that white flurry? Time its demise on the sprouting green grass. Nothing to panic about!” Thus, spring makes me tolerant of her baby steps towards frost-free nights and seed-sprouting days. Time to trade a snow shovel for a rake. The chance to plan a patch of landscape I can more or less control. Spring still feels like the season of “time enough.”
Laurna – 🙂 I’d join you in not rushing to summer. I like the fresh mornings and moderate temperatures of Spring, along with the new growth.
You say, “Spring always arrives.” Even if we spend the whole spring waiting for it.
And then overnight it’s f**king hot summer. Just so long as we don’t have to feather dust the snow off the tulilps.
Barbara – Yeah, I’d appreciate a longer transition but I also want to be able to specify the nature of it, no pun intended. I think I have an idealized Spring in my head, but don’t know if it exists anywhere in the real world.
Out here in B.C. — the coast especially, but also here in the Okanagan — spring is leisurely. It starts in late March, slowly unfolds through April and early May, dissolves into summer in June. I remember spring in Toronto as lasting about one week. The trees were bare, then poof, the ravines exploded into thousands of shades of green. And a week later, they were a more-or-less summer green, everywhere.
Jim T
Jim T – Maybe a leisurely Spring requires a maritime climate or close to it. By the time you get west of the Rockies, the continental extremes take over. Oddly, although our Springs are short, our autumns are long.