Spring Hopes Eternal

It's the first day of spring, and folks in Chicago are, as always, shocked that the weather doesn't seem very springlike just yet. Shocked and offended, as if somebody is playing a cruel joke on a population accustomed to balmy sunshine and snowless sidewalks the moment the clock strikes vernal equinox. Silly.

Silly and irrational, and I'm right there with my neighbors, thinking maybe the astronomers were off by a few days this year. When the readout on my car dashboard told me this morning it was twenty degrees, I considered the possibility that my car could be wrong. After all, every other light on the dash tells me the thing is falling apart at the seams; brain death cannot be far behind. So I flipped the worn and unraveling thumb flap off my mitten and brushed the tip of my thumb across the ever optimistic picture of a bright sun on the screen of my iPhone. My phone is young and healthy, not a tired old coot like my car. It doesn't sound like a flock of angry birds struggling to take flight when I put it to work, and the voices in my head are nowhere near as clear and levelheaded as the voices in my phone. It is clearly nowhere near being brain dead.

Fifty-two degrees, it told me. Aha! I looked more closely, realized even my trusty iPhone, the brilliant little carrier of voices that tell me how to find my way and, occasionally, to watch my language, had thrown in the towel and taken off for Apple headquarters in California. Cheeky little gadget. I brushed across the screen to find the local weather, still hopeful that my car was wrong, that it was not twenty degrees on the first day of spring. Aha! My car was wrong. It was eighteen degrees, not twenty. Ugh. My thumb was freezing from all this research.

Reality hit like a ton of bricks. Cold hard bricks. I began to remember how things work around here. Come to think of it spring-like weather never arrives on the exact date when daytime is as long as night. It tends to arrive in Chicago the moment my airplane touches down somewhere south of the border, someplace that offers up year round warmth for a not so small price plus a whole lot of schlepping. The astronomers have not yet caught up to the findings of deep dark upper middle class suburbia, where the start of celestial spring means nothing and the only accurate harbinger of spring is spring break. Spring break and Murphy's law, two great forces of nature working together to ensure that spring will arrive the moment most of us are somewhere else looking for it.

Which, frankly, does not bode well for me this year, since I won't be going anywhere, at least nowhere appreciably south. I can only assume that the balmy taste of spring hovering over the area for a week will somehow elude me; I will be huddled up in a down jacket, skidding on black ice and trudging through gray slush while birds chirp within earshot and the sun sheds its warm rays tantalizingly out of reach.

But if all goes according to Hoyle (or this guy Murphy), I can comfort myself with the knowledge that winter will return with a vengeance when the flights start returning to Ohare and break time is over. And, as is the case every year, April showers won't arrive until May, and May flowers won't bloom until June. As is the case every year, the astronomers will get it wrong, and, as is the case every year, we will all be shocked and offended.