Here's to the optimists

An ode to messy, muddy Spring

Today’s accompanying tune: “Daylight” by Taylor Swift

Spring is Super Bloom season.

Winter is making one last attempt here in the Mojave Desert. Its final stand, I hope. Unseasonably frigid temperatures, arctic winds, and the possibility, the wish of a dusting of snow. It’s the first weekend in April, and I’m still cranking the heat.

As a kid in the Midwest, spring was often my least favorite season. It had few redeeming qualities — the old, blackened slush gave way to tar-black mud, the leaves still missing from bare trees and the grass a muted brown, not yet ready for new growth. The transitional period was often interrupted by winter’s unrelenting grasp — I’ve borne witness to more than one late May snowstorm along the shores of Lake Michigan, any hope for the warmth of summer frozen next to flowers that had optimistically bloomed the week before. Spring was messy and unpredictable, a few short weeks between weather extremes that kept most people housebound. As any Midwesterner will tell you, the winters are character-building, but not as much as the scorchingly hot, mopping wet summers. Humidity remains high — higher than some places in the Southeast — due to, and this is not a joke, corn and soybean sweat. That’s right, the Midwest summer lives in a soup of its own creation. At first, after brutal windchills, feet of snow, and weeks of 3:30 p.m. sunsets, the transition is welcome. It brings comfortable days, more sunlight. People emerge, blinking in the daylight, out onto the street, ready to participate again. The community emerges, worse for wear after the long winter, into the few-week promise of spring.

I was always more attuned to fall. The crispness in the air, the shorter days. The muted color palate that spoke of hibernation and darkness. The end of a cycle, drawing nearer each day, making each day simultaneously stretch on forever while accelerating toward the finish line. Things feel grand in the fall, full of the importance that comes at the end of a life. It’s a return to school and routine, the start of a new year. The welcomed opportunity to slow down, hunker in, make some chili, go for a run. For the first 22 years of my life, fall was it, and nothing could convince me otherwise.

Then I moved to a city that hardly experienced seasons at all. The temperature sat squarely within a 15-degree range year-round, with the minor exception that sent us running to the nearest store for an air conditioner or, in the more likely event that they were sold out of the scant supply they carried, an oscillating fan. Days bled into weeks into months into years. I tried to tap into the nuances, the subtle differences of the seasons instead — Dungeness crab season in the late winter and early spring was the right time to brave the tourist pier, it wasn’t safe to go outside for a few weeks in September due to wildfire smoke, the return of the parrots and coyotes. Conference season, marked by men wearing lanyards wandering a few square-block area downtown. Beer week, in February, when I couldn’t get into my neighborhood dive bar without hovering near a table. The old Spring of my childhood had mellowed itself in my mind — I longed for muddy tracks and melting snow even if just for something new to mark time. Something tangible, something shared with everyone around me, regardless of their shellfish allergies or places of employment. I wanted to look up and genuinely, sincerely, comment on the weather because it warranted commenting on in the first place.

In a way, seasons in the Mojave are the polar opposite of the city and a funhouse mirror projection of the seasons I grew up in. The cold is bone-chilling, albeit in a different way thanks to the gale-force winds. The heat is stifling, akin to turning a hair dryer on full-blast and sticking it inches from your face. And that’s before monsoon season kicks in, when humidity intensifies the already tense standoff that comes with Santa Ana winds and dry desert brush in the heat of the summer. Snow covers the cholla a few times a year and flash floods rip pavement to pieces. The nuances are there — how the wind picks up after 2 p.m. in the summer after the ground is sufficiently warmed, how certain clouds will give way to torrential downpours in a few hours’ time. Which places flood naturally and which flood because of how the pavement angles unintentionally into a low spot. I am constantly commenting on the weather, the wind, the clouds, because they nearly always warrant commenting on.

But the clear favorite, now, is spring. Spring is hope, growth, new life. Spring is the opportunities that await with longer days, with the threat of colder nights. It is the end of the school year and beginning of the childhood fever dream of summer. It’s the dog awakening from her nap, doing a big stretch, and shaking off the hair that’s accumulated in her sleep. Spring is the flowers painting the hills in vibrant purples, oranges, yellows. It is the return of the songbirds, the return of dove chicks on my porch. It is the slow hum of tourist season coming to a close. It is the return of early morning and late afternoon excursions in the park, away from the midday glare of the sun. It is quiet moments, small changes, that accumulate and eventually become summer. It’s packing away the sweaters and layers I’ve lived in for a month too long and bringing back the sun shirts and shorts. The changing of the Birkenstocks guard, from the Boston clogs to the Arizona sandals.

I don’t think it was a coincidence I quit my job last spring. Faced with the unending optimism and opportunity of the season, I couldn’t bear more of the mundane, more of the same. I wanted to grow with the weeds, as unpleasant as they were. I wanted to learn flight with the dove chicks, as awkward as they were. I wanted to adjust my rhythm to match that of nature, that of the Earth. One where seasons expanded and contracted, days never became weeks and weeks never became months. One where I made the most of it, every time, because thats what spring requires. The temporary state, transitioning from one major season to the next in fits and starts before, with one last gasp, the heat arrives and I retreat into the mountains.

Spring requires trust — trust that the snow will melt, the mud will dry, the bees will be present to pollinate the flowers. Trust that summer is on the other side, that it will be one full of new experiences in the longer days. That inaccessible places will open themselves up to those of us not well-versed in snow travel. In fall there is the certainty of winter, of quiet and calmness in the darker days ahead. But in spring, there is nothing but light, promise, trust. Nothing is certain, but everything is possible.

Here’s to the optimists and opportunists.

- Megan