Late Season Storm

I read this book when I was a little girl, called “Spring Begins in March,” by Jean Little. I would go on author kicks then (I suppose I still do) and read everything on the library shelf by an author. In this book, the girl gets a cold and is not liking the wintery weather. Her mother comforts her and tells her to hang on, that Spring doesn’t begin until March. By the end of the book, it’s turned to March and it is, indeed, Spring.

This bemused me then, as a Colorado girl. No one there in their right minds looks for Spring in February. The hopeful look for it in April. The experienced hold out for May and the jaded wait forlornly until June. Arguably the Rocky Mountain West has no Spring. We go pretty much from winter to summer. In fact, Spring was my least favorite season for most of my life, including now, since I live in Wyoming, because it is just the last nasty, dirty, slushy, miserable phase of winter. Only when I went to college in St. Louis did I discover that Spring can be a season all its own, with gentle warmth and nature in bloom.

This is on my mind this morning with the snow blanketing Alabama and Georgia, and moving to points north. In what they call a “late season storm.” I suppose we all speak from our own perspectives, and the more populated areas of the country speak with louder voices. But the news is jarring to those of us still in full winter. Though here it’s been “unseasonably warm.” I wonder if the meterologists and newcasters have a big book of seasons, perhaps with a map of the country with complex graphs, showing what the season is supposed to be like. Perhaps it has transparent overlays, with anecdotal evidence for what March was like in granny’s day.

I take the agnostic approach: Spring begins when it damn well wants to.