A Michiganian in the Springtime

Well, the first full week of March has come to an end!

March is simultaneously a relief and a frustration of a month. I'll be up front and say I'm not made for Michigan. I love having four seasons, and living here most of my life has no doubt buffered my resistance to cold, but the dawdling end of winter we suffer through here? Not really for me.

So far, things have been good. We've broken out of our snowstorm-every-other day pattern for the time being, the gales of wind have died down, birds are coming back - including campus's geese, hooray for messy paths - and the temperature's gone all the way up to forty degrees! Forty! For a Michigan March that's practically a heat wave!

But a Michigan March is an unreliable beast. This time next week, I might open the blinds to see three foot of snow and the roads coated in ice and hail pummeling the people trying to clear their driveways. Michigan's sort of an adventure like that.

These switches in temperature are going to be the most irritating parts of the next month or two for me. It can be mid-May before the season settles on "spring", but I can feel my brain already slipping into spring mode. "We'll go on walks and go to the zoo and write outside on the porch and go to parks and the Henry Ford Estate and I can drive with the top down on my car and..."

...It gets a little crowded here in my brain.

It gets pretty nostalgic in here, too. My memory isn't the greatest, but some of the things I remember best and with the most fondness are times in the warmth. Zoo trips with my family, complete with enormously tall ice-cream cones from the snack place by the Aviary, sitting on the porch with my friends and watching a thunderstorm off in the distance, long nights in parks and long hours in the shade alongside the waterfall at the Henry Ford Estates, entire days spent working on novels with the sun pouring in and nothing more pressing than pagecount on my mind.

So as the weather temper-tantrums its way into spring and this blog-post-a-week challenge continues, I might wind up talking about the past. A lot. In fact, I have an idea for next week that'll take us waaaay back in time to good ol' 2000...