Searching as always for the signs of spring
People walk on a street. Credit: Getty Images/benedek
Spring has sprung. Or has it?
Sometimes it's hard to tell.
We all have our own yardsticks. For some, it's the first robin hopping around the lawn. For others, it's the crocuses or daffodils pushing their way up through the slowly warming soil, injecting splashes of color back into what's been a dreary landscape.
Baseball is a signifier for others, with the transference of winter to spring marked by pitchers-and-catchers giving way to actual games.
The advent of spring often gets placed on the sliding scale of warming temperatures, though any such declarations are often ruined by March's nasty habit of reeling us back into winter just when we thought we'd left it behind.
For some, spring is ushered in by the onset of daylight saving time with its sudden splurge of evening light and resurgence of morning darkness. For every commuting gripe about leaving home when it's pitch black, you have someone like my grandson who gets on a school bus shortly after 7 a.m. and sagely observes, "I can't do anything in the morning anyway, but after I finish my homework now I can ride my bike."
Spring certainly is about an expansion of opportunity.
Some springs have defined starting dates. Meteorological spring, for example, is based on the calendar, fixed and rigid, used primarily for consistent data analysis by meteorologists. It starts March 1, which based on typical weather around here does not seem to be the best choice for a starting point.
Its cousin, astronomical spring, the one observed by most people, is determined by the Earth's relative position to the sun. Its date varies, which seems more appropriate given nature's fickleness. This year it arrives on Thursday, March 20.
All of which is a way to say that there are different kinds of spring and different ways to measure it, and it sometimes seems to come down to that old legal definition of one of humanity's more prurient behaviors: You know it when you see it.
I don't remember thinking much about spring five years ago, when our lives and minds were newly preoccupied with a new pandemic. I spent a fair amount of time looking out the window by my desk but I wasn't noticing the flowers or the robins. I'm sure they were there. But in those days, I was watching the parade of people in my quiet suburban street.
They were walkers and joggers. They pushed baby strollers and rode bicycles. Many had dogs, many more dogs than I ever realized lived in our neighborhood. Many were people I had never seen before. They nodded and smiled and sometimes spoke to one another but stayed on their respective sides of the pavement. They all were home because COVID-19 had shuttered pretty much everything. And so they took to the streets.
The parade started early in the morning and lasted into the early evening, and it went on for days and then weeks. That year, they were the harbingers, as they gradually traded the jackets and hats of late winter for the shorts and T-shirts of spring.
Those days might have been dark but those walkers were their own sign of our renewal, with their embrace of the outdoors and their discovery of the joys of a simple walk. Especially the couples, most of whom seemed to be happy to be in each other's company, at a time of day in their previous lives when that seldom was the case. They also were an affirmation of the ability of humans to adapt, to make the best of a bad situation, to persevere, to emerge from a cold darkness and grow.
They're not out there anymore, for the most part. Life has changed again. These days I watch the purple crocuses swell and wait for the first robin to appear. And I notice the occasional walker pass my window, and I remember.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
