I’m comfortably seated on a balcony chair in a ray of sunshine. It’s a stunning spring day with optimism riding on the cool breeze, rustling the leaves and seemingly infecting everyone it touches. People walking are smiling and in a city where most appear to be discreet about what they are thinking or feeling, this is a surprise. They have been captured and wrapped in the sunshine and breeze. It’s glorious to see and feel.
Spring is easily my favourite time of year.
The time where bright colours appear out of nowhere, like a rabbit being pulled from a magician’s hat. It’s been there all along, just waiting for the right time to appear. It’s the time of year where you can only be happy. The greyness of winter is gone; the crisp winds, gone; the long nights and short mornings, gone. All replaced by about a billion shades of greens, yellows, purples, pinks, blues, reds and these are just the flowers. The sky is a bright blue and could be used in the opening sequence for The Simpsons if the cartoon version went missing.
As I sit here, my hands and feet are defrosting, bringing me out of hibernation. I would say that I’m like a cat purring while lying in the sunbeam but I’m still a bit anti-cat at the moment and firmly in the pro-dog camp. I still carry the scars of my cat…. Anyway, if my dog was here, she’d be lying in this exact ray of sun that I’m sitting in, pushed against my legs to maximise her warmth and, fortunately for me, provide a cruelty-free-fur blanket over my feet. She’d alternate between being sprawled out to have the sun bathe her entire stomach before standing, turning around four times in one direction, three in the other and curling into a pretzel on my feet in the hope that the sun from her stomach would radiate outwards while her back would now be exposed, like a solar panel sucking it all in for use later.
It has been a long while since I’ve experienced all four seasons. Experiencing them in one day doesn’t quite count. Seems like I will have each of the seasons for a few months. It’s great and is one of the 974 things I’ll like about Japan. Especially if winter can be kept as short as possible.
The part that is a little odd for me is that being born in the southern hemisphere, my birthday is now falling in a different season. I was born in Spring. So was my dog. I think I was born at exactly the right time of year given my feelings of Spring though who is to say if that has come from the timing of my birth or from the season itself or some combination of the two.
I don’t feel the same way about Autumn.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching the leaves change colour and stomping through them when they fall, crunching them so they crackle and splinter into a kaleidoscope of reds, oranges, yellows and browns with some random confused green. It’s just that it’s the start of the end. It’s the end of the sunny time of year and the lead into the blistery cold. Autumn is the last hurrah before hibernation begins. It is the warning of what’s to come as all the trees are stripped of their leaves, leaving them looking horribly exposed, like bizarre skeletons frozen to the ground. At least I can wear clothes. And move.
While I enjoy skiing (I use ‘skiing’ as a loose term for the movement that I make on two planks down a hill), winter is a struggle for me as I find it difficult to be warm enough. It’s a season where I force myself to be active so I can retain some fitness, social skills and employment. It’s not a season I await with eager anticipation.
That season is Spring.
So, I’m thinking about either:
- moving my birthday
- having two birthdays a year
I’ll ponder this as my feet thaw… I have important things on my mind today…
* Thanks to Dave Graney ‘n’ the Coral Snakes for the title to this post. Very entertaining concerts. It’s like he’s having a joke that we’re all in on and doesn’t take himself too seriously though he’s a great musician.