I tried not to fall for it. Lou, I said, don't fall for it. (I call myself Lou because internal dialogue is all about efficiency.) You'll only end up getting hurt, I said. I should have listened to myself. But no. I just kept right on thinking, \Spring is here."" I stopped wearing gloves or a hat. I even looked at a few flower beds for bulb shoots.
I was delusional.
This fact is made all the more painful by knowing I would not have fallen so easily earlier in my life. I spent two years in Duluth, Minn., which is enough to convince anybody that winter will never end. It may retreat briefly, but it's forever lurking nearby. Talk of nice days, or obvious enjoyment of warm weather, serves only to intensify the cold's vengeance.
The first year I lived in Duluth people warned me about long winters. I didn't think much of their cautioning. I did not know at that time what it meant to live in a land without spring. March was indistinguishable from February. April came, and with it the heaviest snowfall of the season. I scraped frost from my windshield for the first half of May. May 25 was opening day of the fishing season. My dad and I went. It snowed.
When summer abruptly began a few days later, I was a shell of a human being. I stepped from the house in shorts, blinking painfully in the sun. The lack of transition had robbed me of all joy. I'd hoped for spring back in March, but the intervening months of bitter cold made that or any hope seem futile. Even in the full of summer I was wary. I checked the forecast constantly, scouting for cold snaps.
The next year deepened my resignation to winter's rule. The thaw came earlier, luring grass to shoot up in sunny places even while snow lay in the shadows. It all seemed a trap. Winter wanted us to believe it'd fled, wanted to see how bold we'd dare to be in its apparent absence. Then it would return and kill everything insolent enough to bloom or sunbathe or wash the car with the garden hose.
But three years of Madison's distinguishable spring slowly unlocked my fears. I began to think of the seasons differently. Winter gives way to summer because it must. The transition between the two is perhaps unpredictable, but it is at least perceptible. I stopped thinking of warmth as something that could only be pleaded from winter's grasp with unquestioning meekness. The cold would fade by degree (ba da bing), and need not be feared in all seasons. Spring was just as strong. Spring would come.
When the weather began to warm a few weeks ago, I at first thought nothing of it. It was February, after all, a winter month most anywhere north of Florida. But the mild days as we moved into March made me dream, even as I forced myself to downplay 56 degrees. It's a fluke, I said out loud as I stood in shirtsleeves on Library Mall. Beneath my bluster, however, I was planning long bike rides and picturing campus when the cherry trees blossom.
Sunday morning I woke up and it was flurrying. The bare trees outside my window swayed in the stiff northwest wind. I felt very much a fool to have dreamt anything spring.
Louie is a senior majoring in journalism. He may be reached at chunkkick@yahoo.com. His column runs every Monday.
