Spring is the New Winter
March 22, 2018
According to the calendar, it’s spring. But when it comes to seasons or the weather, I learned long ago that the calendar means nothing in upstate New York.
Recently, a friend from Ft. Lauderdale was looking forward to visiting and seeing some snow here. When she arrived, we were having one of our unseasonably warm, 60-degree winter days; it was actually colder in Ft. Lauderdale. Two days after she left, 10 inches of snow fell. She was so disappointed to have missed it.
I told her we live the Mark Twain quote: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes.”
Actually, we should call spring in Rochester the “un-season.” Because it’s sure to be unseasonably … something.
Daffodils poke through the snow on the first day of astronomical spring in 2018. Steve Orr/Staff Photographer
When we moved here from Washington, D.C., a friend told me to call her best friend from college who lived in Rochester. She was very nice and gave me lots of advice about neighborhoods and doctors.
But then she made me angry. I told her that after our move in mid-December, we were going to go on a family trip to Mexico with all the Shermans. There was silence on the phone.
And then she said it: “Don’t go away somewhere warm in December. Because in December it’s winter everywhere. You need to go away somewhere warm in April, because when it’s spring everywhere else, it’s still winter here.”
I hated that woman for saying that. Mainly because I eventually learned she was right.
Yet to this day, I still live in denial because every year I’m surprised that when it starts to get warm in other places, it’s still cold here. Or at least unpredictable. We don’t get the kind of spring where balmy days arrive and we can coast right through to summer. Nope. We get that 60-degree day just as a tease. And when we least expect it, we get that Mother’s Day blast of winter.
March is especially hard here because it just feels relentless after the deep freeze of January and February. It’s the one month that feels like it lasts two months. And when another big storm comes up on us in March, I feel like Yogi Berra when he said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Even if we actually manage to forget that spring isn’t spring here, we always have Facebook to remind us that last year there was that epic storm in March that surprised us all (as usual).
I suppose our denial of our weather patterns is just like those people who live in the desert. I love when they tell me it’s really not that hot when it’s 120 degrees out because, as they like to say, it’s a dry heat. That dry heat melted my glasses when I left them in the car once — that’s plenty hot heat to me. On the other hand, right about now I’d trade a dry heat at 150 degrees over our March madness weather.
I’ve always rationalized the absence of real spring here by saying because of our weather, we’ve raised hearty, resilient children. We don’t let snowstorms stop us. And if we’re lucky enough to get a 40-degree day in early spring, we dispense with coats entirely.
In fact, most kids break out the flip-flops at that temperature. If the sun is out, it’s spring in upstate New York. Who cares if it’s 28 degrees? Let’s run in shorts. We have blue skies, gosh darn it, and we will take advantage of them, even if our limbs turn blue.
As first published in the Democrat and Chronicle and USA Today Network.