The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, February 28th. It is the 33rd of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On This Week
We got some spring in Texas this past week. Not the fluttering, brilliant spring, full of pastels and florals, and not the stormy, cleansing spring, but my favorite spring: The muddy one. The one with the warm wind.
I do love those first warm days up north—when the sun’s out and things are melting and everyone’s bouncing on the high of what’s probably some brain chemical but feels of the divine, and maybe is of the divine, and is just granted by the divine through some chemical of the brain. But I love what surrounds those days, too. The mud. The brown, the gray. The warm wind.
When I was in high school, the governing body of Illinois high school athletics—the IHSA—mandated that baseball practice could begin on the Monday of the first week containing a March day. I don’t know if this is still the case. I doubt it’s the case this year, in particular. But it was an exhilarating time, and there was an anticipation to it cultivated by the uncertainty of the season’s change. Some years, you’d be in the fieldhouse for the whole first week, varsity players coming in while it was still dark, freshmen and sophomores practicing after school. Some years, you’d be outside only to return indoors again. Some years, you’d be outside from the beginning, and you’d defy the odds and stay there. I don’t remember which seasons fell into which camps during my four years in the high school world. I remember some things of the first games, later in March—a bit of sunburn on St. Patrick’s Day sophomore year, snow in the shadow of the Burlington Central scoreboard the next week, blue skies throughout Spring Break when I was a junior. But I don’t remember which days were the first outside. What I do remember, from every year, is the warm wind. I don’t remember the dates on which it came. But I remember how it felt.
At our high school, all the fields and practice fields lined up south of the building. They sprawled out, piecemealed together, with a quick, tidy slope separating what was generally the baseball and soccer half of campus from the football and track half. On the days of the warm wind, the ground would be muddy. Rock-hard frozen in some spots. The grass patchy and brown. But under a thickly overcast sky, the wind would blow, and it would buffet you, but it wouldn’t bite you the way it had for the last three months. It was, after all, a warm wind. Drying the land. Clearing the way for summer.
Baseball is, of the historically prominent American sports, the only one whose calendar tracks with the calendar year. The others follow the academic schedule. Football begins at the end of summer and tapers at fall’s end. Basketball and hockey traverse winter’s expanse. I don’t know the soccer calendar in America, but I know in Europe the leagues lay low in the summer months. But of those institutional sports—the ones with which newspapers knitted our culture through so much of the twentieth century—baseball is the only one to follow the arc of a calendar year.
I think this contributes to the romanticism that surrounds the game. Its beginning. Not its historic beginning, but its annual beginning. Its sprouting. Its peek out of the mud. Its return, carried back by the warm wind. In high school, this was an anticipatory time, and I suppose the wind conditioned me to love it, as it brought back the thing that brought me so much hope as an athlete. The wind blew. The mud dried. And onto the mound I stepped.
The warm wind doesn’t come to Texas much. Not in my experience so far, anyway. There are hot winds, like hair dryers, often here in Austin accompanied by the grit of construction. There are cold winds, the biting kind, making one wish one had consulted the weather forecast. But there are few warm winds. Spring in Austin is more like a two-month Spring Break vacation than the oscillating dance of a spring up north. It’s often beautiful. Dazzling. Sparkling. Or, it’s damp and cloudy and a bit cold, but not in a hopeful way. Not in a progressive way. It’s just more winter, or more of what passes for it here.
And so it struck me when I felt it this past week—that familiar warm wind, crossing the mud, bringing the land out from a week of northern winter imitation. It was spring again. The spring I knew, greeting me from my past. It warmed my skin, and it soothed my cracked hands, and it soothed the parts of me that hope, too.
Because it made me think of home.
Because it made me think of baseball.
Next week’s essay: On Yesterday, the Day We Brought Home Fargo
