“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest,” is a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” and seems to be a common sentiment amongst the populace. Spring is a time of new beginnings, the flowers bloom, the birds start chirping again, my eyes itch and I have to haul across campus in the middle of downpour to keep from using one of my three missed attendances. A fun time is had by all.
Of course, my facetiousness should only serve to exemplify my message: I cannot bring myself to care about all this nice nonsense about spring that will be spewed for eternity when I can’t stand the season. There’s nothing beautiful about a season you have to suffer through bleary-eyed. Flowers you can neither smell nor see because of the very same substance which makes them bloom.
There’s a level of incompatibility between me, and presumably folks like me, that is suppressed by an overwhelming favor for the switch up March tends to pull. Coming in like a lion, never going out like a lamb, spring announces itself with a suffocating humidity more often than not. The smell of ozone hits, and you know a sharp temperature rise from the livid, joyous death of winter will come soon.
That’s only the most obvious of symptoms however, wading through the swamp that is the air in this season is something everyone notices. For those of us who have suffered through phys-ed in the grass with no Claritin in our system, it hits with a wave of congestion and an untreatable itch. The urge to mar your eyeballs only briefly solved by eye drops, or in a pinch, fountain water
The helplessness of feeling the intense need to remove your sight vessels from your skull and set them in a sterile fluid just overtakes a sect of the populace like clockwork every year. Nothing to be said of the alternate, and oftentimes parallel, path of congestion. The absolute embarrassment of being rendered a mouth breather against your will. A body always working against your urge to not hyperventilate all day.
A nose that vacillates between being a snot factory and less portable than the Red Sea sans Moses.
The rawness of having rubbed the sides of your nose with so many napkins or tissue that only prevent you from looking like a dribbling idiot, a stopgap measure. A suite of symptoms whose only cure is the passing of these most wretched of months. A suite that doesn’t even account for the regional menace that is the increase in insectoid activity.
Somehow, in spite of its beloved qualities, the season of the mosquito’s rise somehow never catches allegations that stick. The malaria menaces and the bump bandits start coming out in full force around the time that it starts getting far more convenient to show off their attack areas. Spring’s symbiosis with annoying bugs not ending there, it also starts bringing out the wasps. An entomophobe’s personal torture months, rolled in with a premade funeral bouquet.
Wall after wall is put between me and enjoying the supposed beauty of blooming nature. The comparative hostility of the environment compared to the winding down of the cooler seasons is just intolerable to me. Gone is the permanent briskness of winter, and the beautiful decay of autumn, left is only the rearing of the ugly head of the all consuming, year after year heatwave. I can’t even say I get down with the increased sunshine.
The days get longer, the nights get shorter, and the time I have to spend with my dreaded enemy, the Sun, increases bit by bit as the early spring showers begin to dry up. I mourn the lead up to the winter solstice with every effervescent sunrise and pray for its swift return with every sunset. Springing forward for that extra hour of sunlight every year, of course, bears mentioning as a personal lowpoint.
Perhaps I’m simply a dower, sunhating ghoul, but I just can’t get on with spring. We’re well acquainted, we just can’t vibe. So this one goes out for the rest of the vampires and things that go bump in the night, stuck trapped in the season of bloom for yet another year; cheers to the eventual death of the season of life.