It’s beginning to feel a lot like spring where I live. I have always appreciated living where we experience all four seasons. According to my first graders, those seasons are: Halloween, Christmas, their birthdays, and summer vacation. I tried, mostly in vain, to teach the seasons of the year. We went over them at calendar every single day. Every. Single. Day. (Of course, there was the one year when my class was distracted by the Macarena being led by my teaching assistant in another part of the room.) But back to the point- spring. Spring is not my favorite season. I can hear many of you sighing as you read that. How can I not love spring? I do love it- it’s just not my favorite. Fall is my favorite. Spring is my second favorite. I am a former first grade teacher. I can have second and third favorites. I am basically a six year-old.
Why is spring not my first favorite? Yes, first favorite is a real thing. I just typed it. That makes it real. The biggest reason is a simple one. The air. Spring air is toxic. It is full of all things that make me sick. I can just look out my window and start sneezing. It’s disguised as pretty blue skies with white, puffy clouds, but it is really like walking into a vat of pollen every time you open your front door. You want to go outside. It’s pretty and finally warm, but not too hot. You can wash your car and go on picnics. You can take long walks in the park. I can barely walk to my car without my eyes swelling shut and I took allergy injections for six years. If I took a walk in the park, my nose would be too big to fit in the car for the ride home.
And another thing about the air. I hear people saying that they cannot wait to open their windows to let the “fresh air” in. Obviously, my windows are never opened. No toxic outside air is getting inside this house. But I have a problem with the term “fresh” when it’s used with the air in Southeast Missouri. When I visit the mountains, the air in the mountains is fresh. There are babbling brooks and fresh mountain breezes. When I go to the beach, the water off of the ocean is fresh. I have lived in this area for fifty years. I have never once described our outdoor air as “fresh.” We have a finite list of what the outdoor air fragrance might be at any given time. Here are our choices: 1. manure 2. dead fish 3. burn pile 4. fair food 5. cut grass. If you are one of the few people not affected by allergies, you might enjoy the cut grass smell, but that is the only one that is even slightly palatable. So why people want to open their windows and allow these scents to flow through their homes escapes me. I understand the desire for new air, I guess. I think I get enough new air when my doors open. And as for fresh? How about a candle? A Wallflower? A wax burner? My house smells like a cool ocean breeze right now and I am nowhere near the ocean and my air is probably the same air that was in this house twenty years ago. My nose loves it!
I’m also not a fan of spring showers. I know we need rain. I would be perfectly fine if it rained every single day, as long as it rained at night when I was asleep. I travel a lot with my job and it is a real pain to load and unload my car with boxes and bags in the pouring rain. It makes my clothes and shoes all soggy and then I have to present to a group of teachers while looking like a drowned rat. The rain also makes my new car dirty, which is very upsetting to me. I try very hard to keep it spotless. I have to keep it ten years, you know. It has to stay looking really nice. Rain just makes me a grump.
Spring clothes. Not a fan. I am old. I look good in winter clothes; the more coverage the better. Not to mention the fact that my skin is so pale that you need sunglasses to look at it directly. In the good old days, I would spend a few weeks at the tanning bed to prepare myself for shorts and skirts. I know better now, and I no longer do that and wish I had not then. But, aside from the terrible health consequences, the tanning bed experience is something I really miss. As someone who is perpetually cold, a tanning bed is a warm cocoon of paradise. It was one place where I actually felt warm! And I was absolutely by myself, without interruption, for fifteen minutes. I have to stop writing about it or I am going to go ahead and go back, even though it is so bad for me. Fifteen minutes of warmth, in absolute silence. OMGoodness!! Why does that have to be bad for me! Not to mention that I am far enough south that I think tan fat looks better than pale fat.
But enough about what I don’t like. There are lots of things I DO like. My favorite part of spring? Easter baskets! I LOVE to make Easter baskets! According to Mark (my husband), this is because I generally just like to buy things. While he is 99% correct, I prefer to put a different spin on it and say that I like to GIVE things. Easter baskets and egg hunts are just right up my alley. And it has been so long since Christmas. I haven’t gotten to do anything festive in ages. I already have out all of my Easter decorations. I love to pick out things for every person’s basket. I try really hard to think of just what he/she would like. Sometimes I will go with a theme and do a themed basket. Emily likes a scavenger hunt on Easter morning, so I put clues in eggs and she follows the clues in eggs all around the house to find her basket. Matthew stopped playing along to that game a while back, sadly. Honestly, he would prefer that I just gave him the money I would spend on a basket of treats. Too bad! I won’t make him hunt for his basket, but I will make him a basket for as long as I live. I even have games for the grown-ups after lunch. I have to make the most out of the day. It’s my last festive celebration until Halloween!
I also love Daylight Savings Time. When it is dark, it is my bedtime, regardless of what the clock might say. This past week, Mark wanted to borrow Matthew’s truck to pick up some fertilizer and peat moss. Mark assumed Matthew would be home around 4:30 P.M. He waited and waited and still no Matthew. By around 5:30 P.M., Mark took off his shoes and decided to wait until the next night. It was getting dark. When Matthew came home at 6:30 P.M., he was in shock that Mark would not leave the house. Mark kept saying, “But it’s dark out!” That’s when you know you have really turned into your parents. I was totally with Mark. I was not about to leave the house. I had my yoga pants on and my contacts out. I was done. When it stays light out until after 8:00 P.M., I am slightly more motivated to keep moving after dinner. I probably wouldn’t go out for peat moss, but I might be convinced to go out for ice cream.
Even though I will have to go outside to do it, I will plant flowers in the spring. I squirt in extra nasal spray and hope for the best. I have one flower bed and flower pots on my porch and deck. We have a lot of deer, so I can’t plant flowers too far from my house or they will just become snacks. When I was home all summer, I planted quite a few pots of flowers. I have had to taper that off now that I work in the summer. I don’t have as much time to tend to them as I did before. I start out really well, watering, weeding, and pruning very regularly. But by late July, I am pretty tired of the whole thing. I feel guilty, because I planted them and they are alive and depend on me. But when that first frost comes, I am one happy camper.
My last favorite part of spring (yes, that’s a real thing too) is my Emily’s birthday. This year she will be seventeen. That’s strange to type, because I am certain she must be only five or six. She will be a senior next year. I can remember her very first birthday party. She was a birthday princess, with a little pink tutu and a shiny tiara. When we lit the candle on her cake, she just stared at it, like we were crazy for giving her fire. She didn’t eat cake for a while after that. She was a momma’s girl. She never strayed too far from my side. She has become a fiercely independent young lady now. But she will always be my birthday princess. And I will make her a scavenger hunt on Easter for as long as she will let me.
