Today is the day of the spring equinox, that day in which the sun looks down on Earth from directly above the equator, on its way north. It's generally regarded as the first day of spring, although it will be a while yet here in the Great Land before spring is fully upon us. But it's on the way, and while much of the country has dealt with (and is still dealing with) a harsher-than-usual winter, now we can relax a little, knowing that the sun is on its way north, and the days are getting longer.
This happens, of course, because our little spinning blue-green ball has an axial tilt of about 23.44 degrees. In our winter, the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, shortening the days and diluting the sunlight that we get. Here, at the latitude my wife and I live at, it's conspicuous, the difference between winter and summer; in the depths of winter we see maybe 3 1/2 hours of daylight, while for a time in mid-summer, the sun only dips below the horizon and still lights up the sky. At present, we are gaining an hour of daylight every ten days.
Spring, though, has a lot more meaning for us than just the cosmological aspects.
One of my favorite writers, Hal Borland, wrote of spring:
March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.
March is all of that; when I was young, the northeast Iowa spring was certainly associated with mud, but also with the joy of knowing summer was on the way. Borland went on to mention April and May:
April is a promise that May is bound to keep.
I've been fortunate to see the spring come 63 times now. Spring is different in many places, but it holds the same promise. In Japan, it's the time of the cherry blossoms. Even Tokyo, a city that is so huge, so densely populated that it's hard for us to comprehend, sets aside space for the cherry trees. Every spring they explode in white and pink, and when the blossoms are done, the petals fall to the ground and the wind gathers them into drifts of white and pink, like fragrant snow.
In Iowa, when I was a boy, the spring was heralded by melting snow and the resulting mud. A wrong turn might find one stuck up to the axles in mud, and even tractors would sink in. But April brought more sunshine, things dried out, the wildflowers in the forests and meadows burst into bloom, and the summer birds - goldfinches, robins, wood thrushes, and whippoorwills - returned to our woods.
I once spent a lovely spring day on the Boston Common. The grass was already lush and green, the day was warm, and I spent about half an hour gabbing with two local guys who invited me to sit and join them, after having noted my walking past in a very un-Boston-like big white cowboy hat and boots. I had a beer with them and talked about Boston, the history of the Common, and the spring.
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Most of all, spring is a time of hope. It's a time of renewal. And it's a part of that wheel, that never stops turning. Another of my favorite writers, Edwin Way Teale, wrote of the seasons:
The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north.
Spring is moving north again. It's a time for hope. The sun is returning to us. Summer is coming.
