Spring

When I was little, Oosje and Bampa ordered a few books that were "Me and the ____". Long before desktop publishing, someone was making personalized books and wrote stories in which I was the protagonist, accompanied by Auntie BSU, Tarol & Tenny (my next-door neighbors), and Tomo (our short-lasted evil little dog). Together we had adventures including Me and the Yellow-Eyed Monster, Me in the Mousehouse, Me and the Bee, and Me and the Reluctant Robin.

In Me and the Reluctant Robin, it is time for Spring to come but it has been delayed. Armed with some basic craft supplies, the crew went south with in search of a red-breasted robin. The problem was that Spring can't arrive until someone sees the first red-breasted robin, but he ws cozy and warm in the south and didn't feel like flying to Snowland to herald in the season. He had some pretty whiney complaints. "It's too cold." "There are no flowers." "There are no bugs or butterflies." "There is no rain." With our craft supplies and a little bit of magic, we remedied the situation and coaxed the robin back north to do his duty.

OK, no, I don't remember all these details. I still have the book, along with the rest of the set.

Because of the book, every spring for my childhood, we looked for the first red-breasted robin as the sign that Spring had arrived. To this day, I still notice the first one I see in the year, and that is the start of Spring for me. While the books didn't cover the advent of Summer, Fall and Winter, I have ways of knowing when those arrive, too. The feel of the air, the smell, the change in humidity, and the fact that my skin gets dry.

Daddy and I realized some years ago that he has another way of identifying the seasons, which he is very adamant about. He knows it is Spring, or whatever, when the calendar tells him so. It's an actual fact, he says, that seasons have a calendar duration.

This is true in a technical sense. But, when the first snow hits on Halloween and there several feet of snow on the ground by Thanksgiving, requiring snowpants, down jackets, boots (not the pretty moon boots that the other girls have, but the practical, brown, "Packs" that would actually protect us from the cold) just to get to school, it's hard to say it's still Fall for another month.

I've recently thought that maybe the difference in our identification of the seasons is because Daddy grew up in Sunland, where there are only really two seasons: Summer and January. So, the only way he could tell that it was Spring was by consulting the calendar. I posed this theory to him, and he disagrees. He still thinks that use of the equinox and solstice is the only way that anyone who is not insane marks the seasons.

So, for those of you who are comfortable with an intuitive or nature-based approach to the seasons, the first red-breasted robin appeared on Daddy's barbeque on Tuesday morning, coming just a few days before the sun-spending-equal-amounts-of-time-above-and-below-the-horizon-at-all-points-on-earth definition.