Spring has arrived! It depends on the hemisphere and time zone, but March 20 is the first day of spring. (Yay!) There is still a bit of snow on the ground, and I had to scrape off the windshield on the vehicle I drove this morning, but the sun is shining! For me, though, it won’t quite feel like spring until there is no snow and much mud. When I was younger (cough, cough, two years ago…) I would often walk barefoot outside as soon as the temperature reached a whopping +15 degrees, wearing shorts and squelching my way through whatever mud I could find until I had “mud boots” halfway to my knees. My toes would get numb because the mud wasn’t quite summer temperature yet, but spring called for outside!
Spring is one of my favorite seasons. As it will surprise no one to hear, I dislike extremes either way—too hot or too cold. And the problem with fall is that I pull out the parka once we hit 15 degrees, but in spring it feels downright balmy at 15 degrees. It’s practically t-shirt weather in the spring. Spring manages to avoid both trying-to-skate-in-minus-forty weather and decided-to-do-a-play-and-now-I’m-stuck-performing-in-a-church-with-no-air-conditioning-or-a-ceiling-fan-in-plus-thirty-five-degree weather. (Yes, that actually happened.) Spring is settled nicely in between.
Spring is a season of life. Baby animals, flowers, everything is teeming with life in spring. It’s so interesting that after the coldest, dead-est season of the year, we get the most vibrant and full of life time of year, to bring us out of that pit of wintery-ness. I think God must have known we wouldn’t last a year without spring and new life. “Marilla, walking home one late April evening…realized that winter was over and gone with the thrill of delight that spring never fails to bring to the oldest and saddest as well as to the youngest and merriest.” (Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery) I think we all delight in the new life and the warmth that is spring; humans need that fresh outlook on life. Spring is sort of like hope. And hope is something that we, all of us, need.
