Spring is, unequivocally, the worst season in the Midwest. Its best days—the warm, merciful, sunlit ones, where nature grants you a brief reprieve from your travails—are on par with the best efforts of other seasons: crisp fall mornings, soft summer nights, the feeling of watching snow fall in big, heavy clumps. But its best days are so good mostly because of their anomality. The rest are hell broken by the occasional breath of hope or nostalgia when the clouds are thicker than thick and the wind’s blowing warm over the mud of melted snow.
Because of this, I always hated spring. Hated it, hated it, hated it. Until I moved to Austin.
The romance associated with spring makes sense anywhere—we can idyllicize the good days, assign the bad to winter—but it especially makes sense in places that are not the Midwest. At least, it makes sense in that span extending from Maryland to Texas, the same one that forms the divide between America’s two primary patterns of speech. It’s possible the range within which spring is good covers more ground than the Texas-and-Washington-inclusive South. I don’t know. You do, though, wherever you are. You know whether you live in a place where spring is occasionally kind and mostly terrible or a place where spring is a wonderful assortment of months.
In Austin, spring is revelous. South by Southwest was last week. NASCAR and the PGA and the Texas Relays are all in town this weekend. In two weeks, bachelorette parties not planned by the most Type A or Type B maids of honor will begin a month and a half, roughly, of filling the streets with pedal pubs (the Type A ones try their luck in January and February, unaware Austin can be chilly, the Type B ones sweat it out in July, unaware Austin’s dead as bones that time of year [But it’s still fun in both those seasons! Don’t worry, brides-to-be, you’ll have the best time! {whew, got away with that}]). The highs range from 70° to 95°, and there are frequent storms—bombastic storms—but it’s always either stormy or sunny, and the storms fill up the creek, which is the best part of this town when it’s flowing all the way through.
I’ve an impression spring is also the best in D.C., where my wife lived back when we were doing long-distance out of college. Theirs is a more Midwestern-adjacent spring, not impacted by the collision of gulf and desert like Central Texas is. It’s a deciduous spring, and what it’s really is a spring with enough of the best days to form a quorum.
In the Midwest, though, springtime is torture interspersed with mercy, which I believe is sometimes part of the whole torture experience to begin with. Good luck up there, friends. We don’t miss days like yours coming on Thursday.
