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It's All In The Definition ...

I grew up in Texas. The most ambiguous word in my adopted home, the Upper Midwest, is “spring.”

In Texas we knew what spring meant. It was an event. It happened on a day in March. The birds sang. The bluebonnets bloomed. The grass unfurled its delicate verdant green. All coats were shorn. This happened on a single day. It was spring, and it never looked back. In just a few months, we knew, we would be able to save electricity by frying our eggs on the driveway cement.

Up here in the Great Lakes area, no one knows what spring means. Some say it’s when it’s “no longer winter,” but no one knows when winter is no longer. Others say it’s when you can no longer park the trailer on the ice pond without it sinking. I have heard upper Midwesterners describe a blizzard in April as “a spring snow storm.”

Some people around here are convinced that it is spring when, after a snow falls, it’s melted within a week. Others have told me spring starts in early April. Others say mid-April. One person told me that after May 1st it’s always spring. That same year an exhibition baseball game was cancelled on May 5 because it was only 35 degrees outside. The next week the game was played in 90-degree heat.

Spring, I’m told, is when the trails in the parks are too muddy to walk on.

Every April, I try to categorize the days. Recently I counted 15 fall days in April; 9 summer days; and 6 winter days. I didn’t count any spring days. April is late October with more sun. That’s when it’s not early November with longer days.

Then one day in early June my neighbor greeted me on an 80-degree morning. Ah, he said, now this is what I call spring!

This is Tom McBride, and that’s my frustrated perspective.

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