Spring ahead

Did you know that there is not just one season called spring? No, I don't mean that there's a spring in the Northern Hemisphere and half a year later there's one in the Southern Hemisphere. We've got a tilted earth and there's simply not a whole lot we can do about that. This is what we might call the beginning of cosmological spring, for that's how our particular corner of the universe has been put together.

No, I'm talking about the "other" spring ... the meteorological spring. For whatever reason, whoever came up with our calendar simply refused to acknowledge that the seasons, like the signs of the zodiac, and all that stuff nobody likes to think about anymore all start around the 20th or 21st of their given months. Spring "officially" starts at the spring equinox, that day/time, if you will where we have equal periods of light and dark (more or less ... it's not all that precise). In the spring, the sun is making it's yearly journey north (for those of us upon this side of the world), and at some point, it crosses the so-called celestial equator, whereas in the fall, at the autumnal equinox, the sun is heading south again ... like lots of us in the North would like to do in the winter. That whole snowbird idea was around a long time before we thought of calling it that. Oh yeah, this year it will "happen" on March 20, 2013 at 11:02 UTC (or just after 5 am for those of you in New York).

When you stop to think about it, we're pretty much out of touch with nature and the natural cycles of things. I mean for millennia, literally thousands of years, day began when the sun came up; it ended when the sun went down and that's when night started, which ended when the sun came up again ... well, you get the picture. Actually, if we really wanted to get technical (which I don't) the sun doesn't rise or set at all, the earth turns and it looks as the sun is rising or setting. Some metaphors sit very, very deep. Others not so much. So now a "day" begins and end at "midnight" (which is the completely wrong word when you think about it), and months start on their first, but the actual seasons, well, they still follow pretty much the same old pattern

Pretty much. Weather people, regardless of how chaotic their subject matter may inherently be, are still trying hard to force a bit of order onto that chaos, so they've come up with meteorological seasons. It's simple: March, April and May constitute spring; June, July and August make up summer; fall consists of September, October and November, and winter runs from December through February. Very neat, very orderly, very much out of rhythm, but, hey, who's paying all that much attention anymore?

So, in a sense, spring has already sprung. It sprang ahead of itself. It's already spring, winter's over, aren't we glad? I suppose, but it doesn't feel that much like spring yet. I'd say winter is dragging his feet. I wonder if the sun has some heavy burden that's slowing him down? Oh well, for some of us, we've still got almost a week to go.