Sprung

It's hard to believe, but hurricane season is only two months away.

I heard this on the TV news this evening. Yes, it's April 3. Yes, it's 40-something degrees outside with daylight still left. And, yes, hurricane season is (only) two months away.

I'm not here to rant on about the news. They've got a difficult job, having to communicate with few words and curious selections of images.

But, kind of indirectly, it makes me think about something I've noticed after 34 years living in South Carolina. Something about the idea of springtime in a place that everybody assumes has to be warm all the time.

This is the Deep South. When you think of April 3 in the Deep South, you don't think of 40-something-degree highs. I would say, "Well, that's if you don't live here," but that's not the case.

For whatever reason, people who have lived here their entire lives seem to live under this delusion of expected warmth.

The truth is, it starts getting warm here in the spring ... but each and every year, there are plenty of days that it's cold. Cold as shit, in fact, if shit is cold.

Yet people who should know better say all the time when it's cold in March and April and even a bit into May that they "thought it was supposed to be springtime."

It took me awhile to realize this. When I was 19 this time of year, I distinctly remember shivering in shorts and t-shirts in denial of the fact that just because the sun had officially crossed the equator didn't mean it was license to so-easily put winter behind me.

Because putting winter behind you is work, an uncomfortable, plodding transformation.

Something that I've grown to like about where I live is the changing seasons. It's like a liturgy that binds you to a fundamental understanding. Each year, we live through a symbolic-yet-very-real cycle of life and death.

The dead, brown leaves that a March wind blows seem like ghosts hissing when the first blooms are emerging. On a day when the sun feels like a merciless taskmaster, you can't imagine that the ground your sweat drips on was and will be again covered in a sheet of ice.

It's taken me three decades, but I've learned that no amount of thinking otherwise will change the fact that spring is a season I just endure.

It's a harsh time, much like birth seems to be (though I neither remember being born nor have to bear the burden of giving birth).

I don't like the flowers of spring.

I don't listen to music in the spring.

I don't try to actively enjoy anything in the spring.

A 65-degree is not ideal to me. Nor is a 75-degree day.

I like it 85.

Or more.

Or 35.

Or less.

Spring here in South Carolina is a reflection of the general rawness of our culture.

It's ironic that the people of a state so used to dysfunction wouldn't recognize the bi-polar nature of its most-misunderstood season.