Spring Sympathy Card to the Gulf Coast

This is the time of the year when I pity residents of the Gulf Coast.

They have had to endure months of annoyingly green lawns, flowering plants and temperatures in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Those who live on the ocean coast have it even worse: ocean breezes moving the surf out and back according to the orbital pattern of the moon rather than at the whim of terrestrial forces out of the Canadian prairies.

Boring.

What do residents of the south have to look forward to in March, April and May? More green plants, more orchid colored-petals, more days of room temperature. Same old same old. It's like being stuck on the same channel showing the same episode of "Swamp People" over and over again. Unchanging nice weather is unique the first dozen days but begins to look tired four months later. On the Gulf, Halloween looks like Thanksgiving looks like Christmas looks like President's Day looks like Easter.

We in the Midwest, however, actually do have seasons. Summers up here are like the best days in Orlando but without the hurricanes. Stunning falls days overwhelm the imagination of even the Disney Imagineers and December holiday decorations in the Midwest actually look appropriate. A Styrofoam snowman wired down to a muddy Georgia front lawn with blinking green and red lights is just wrong. Sure, we have some snow up here (just to clean the landscape up while plants are resting) and the cold can be biting, but those temperatures also bring ice fishing and record sturgeon spearing and once in a generation ice caves off Lake Superior. We may get a little testy toward the end of February, but that's what fireplaces are for.

Spring is the season that really sets us apart from the unfortunates in the Gulf. As snow banks inch back from driveway edges during 40-degree days, the first hints of new life peak out from under last year's leaf cover. Slender, pale green shoots push up under last year's debris unfurling insistent single and double leaves that soak in the sun of longer days and grow. The robins are back searching along the south side of house foundations, and the cardinals never left. Red-wing blackbirds resume their sentry positions along the riverfront trail that links neighboring cities. Tree buds are round with the year's new promise of life.

We are some weeks away from the first sight of crocus, narcissus and tulip, but the corner has been turned even if we occasionally have a single digit night. Highs in 30s and 40s bring new spring to our steps, clear the sidewalks of ice and snow and coax neighbors out onto adjoining driveways to talk about surviving another winter. Spring light brings us out and brings us out smiling.

Without the annual cycles of the seasons, we are no more real than department store spring manikins posing on plastic grass with fabric birds singing in the cutout trees. Pretty to look at, but insubstantial and lacking the depth of connection to natural cycles of the world. Without this seasonal grounding, beginning with the slow rise of spring from winter, we drift untethered through the temporal breezes of the year, sort of like a Gulf Coast breeze.