Happy (Fake) Spring!
We’re in that weird time of year when it’s technically Spring, but every warm sunny day still feels like a stolen moment to be enjoyed with hushed zeal and whispered laughter out of fear of scaring it off. On the East Coast it’s typically referred to as Fake Spring.
“It won’t last,” well-meaning people say to one another. It’s always in lines—at grocery stores, or while pumping gas, when they give each other knowing grins at the freshly-donned t-shirts and light sweaters. “Enjoy it now. We always get snow in April.”
It’s true—the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April tend to bleed together like a watercolor painting. They present a mirage of fresh Spring weather, the dewiness in the air Earth’s first waking breath after a long rest. Birds stretch their heads towards the blue sky and sing out the first melodies of the season. The smell in the air curves just on this side of sweetness, a hesitant question of possibility.
Maybe now?
Not yet.
For, seemingly without warning—sometime in mid-April—the bite of cold rushes back in, covering the delicate watercolor painting in a thick, opaque coat of white. The canvas grows heavy once more. The Earth hits snooze. Spring will have to mix its colors from scratch again—perhaps it will try again in May.
But we are not there yet. We are still in Fake Spring. And while some people might keep Fake Spring at arm’s length, not wanting to get too attached to its warmth should it disappear for a while, I hold it as close as possible. It is the same reason why, despite March getting a bad rap for being a long trek of a month, It’s one of my favorite months: it is when we are In-Between the seasons. And the In-Between season is my favorite season of all.
You see, to me, the In-Between season is better than the actual season itself. It is the same reason why Thursday night is almost better than Friday and Christmas Eve ever so slightly more sparkly than Christmas Day. It is the anticipation—being on the brink of something changing, but remaining suspended in the weightless, liminal space before it does. We eagerly wait for the next season to show up at our doorstep like a date arriving to pick us up, and while we wait, we look for the clues that tell us it might be on its way.
Summer
Spring’s light stretching into the end of the day reaches further and further, until suddenly you are drunk on the daylight that you can soak up into the evening. Suddenly venturing out of the house past 6:00 PM doesn’t feel like readying yourself for a treacherous journey, but rather starting an entire second day again, fresh and excited.
The air swells around you like orchestral music at its peak. The heat almost feels indulgent—you revel in the ability to walk outside, nearly at all hours of the day, without so much as a sweatshirt. The warmth embraces you immediately, sometimes stifling in its excess. But you’ve missed it throughout those colder months. You are grateful it has returned.
Juice from a piece of watermelon the size of your face runs down your wrists, leaving a sticky residue in its wake. You’d slow down and clean up, but there’s no point—it’ll only happen again with every bite.
The setting of most everything becomes the beach or the pool in these Summer months. There is no better place to lazily swipe your eyes over the pages of a book or take a catnap under a wide umbrella. The inevitable burn you’ll receive from the sun holding onto you too tightly will be soothed by the cool aloe gel you have at home later.
Mosquitos nip at your arms as you linger outside at dusk. You know you should go inside, but the sky is so pretty, and the cool breeze passing by has finally made its way through the heat to say hello. Tomorrow you will regret the red welts, but tonight you swat at the bugs and hope for the best.
You sit around a bonfire with your closest friends, twirling sticks around with marshmallows puffed up on the ends. You haven’t seen these faces in a while—Summer, in its languid expansion, has separated you for several weeks. The orange flame coming off the fire illuminates their faces around you in the kind of warmth you feel constantly in their presence. You love them, you think. You love Summer.
Fall
The accompaniment of crunching leaves harmonizing with every step on our once-sweat-filled walks.
The first few weeks of school, when it seems everyone is still mentally in Summer. “September…” pencils scratch in corners of papers. You know, in the back of your head, that these will be the crinkled, forgotten sheets you pull from the depths of your backpack come June.
Early morning wake up calls,, each step of the routine clunky as your body struggles to remember the motions. The sky tries to nudge you awake. You haven’t yet gotten used to seeing each other at this time again.
A flirtation with the cold as you venture outside on Halloween without a coat. Both you and Fall know that when you meet there will be goosebumps on your arms and wind tickling the back of your neck, but you’re not ready to let go of Summer’s liberation yet.
The warm glow from kitchen lights, seen only from under the cover of dusk’s blue blanket as you peer in in passing from the car window.
The burrowing when we all curl inward—flowers blooming in reverse, getting ready for the cold months ahead.
Winter
The first snowfall: pure, untouched flakes cascading down. You tilt your head towards the sky and laugh. The flakes tickle your eyelashes as they kiss them hello. The bite of the cold wakes up your lungs and you inhale it in big gulps. The frigidity pinches your nose lovingly. Hello again, it seems to say, slow as molasses. I’ll try not to be too harsh. You grimace. Winter always gets there, at its peak, wholly unaware of its sharpness—but you welcome it home anyway.
The low lighting only achieved by the illumination of Christmas decorations: the twinkle of lights on the tree, the blues and purples and reds of the miniature village sitting on a mantle, the white light of a star refracting on the surrounding walls.
The smell of pine and gingerbread enveloping you from all angles as you flip through a selection of movies that promise to make you believe in holiday spirit.
The wonder of being so small as a kid, watching the stars pass by through the car window on your way home. It’s Christmas Eve. You secretly look for the red glint of Rudolph’s nose as your eye jumps around to each bright spot in the navy sky.
The anticipation on a random Tuesday night as snow blankets everything outside in powder white. Will the phone ring? Will your school’s name pop up on the TV screen? The call comes. You whoop and yell and suddenly it’s not too late at night for hot chocolate at all. There’s no school tomorrow. This, you think. This is the best of life.
The fluffy white snow turns gray and slush-like. December turns into January. One year folds over onto the next. You’re tired of Winter—its harshness has returned. Then, of course, you feel bad; the world is changing. Nature has been weeping for years. You should appreciate Winter staying, you think. And so you trudge along. Maybe it’s not so bad.
February comes and goes and the grayness of the season is broken up with pops of red and pink. The cold still stings when you first walk outside, but you can see ahead again. Winter’s flurries have cleared; the path is not so blinding. The red, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates move in. Its cloying sweetness coats your throat and eases the perpetual sting from the cold. Soon, you think. Soon it will be Spring.
Spring
The air tastes sweet against your tongue and feels balmy around your shoulders. It smells like Spring.
The clock jumps forward, eager to get you up and out into the emerging warmth. You groan at first. Your body protests: it’s too early.
No, Spring responds. It’s time.
Everyone around you smiles a bit more. There is a light in everyone’s eyes that has not been there in months. That is the homecoming gift that Spring brings, like a distant relative with a backpack full of prizes for the children. Spring’s prize of choice, though, is traveling from person to person, re-igniting their inner lantern.
You still don’t trust Spring’s sturdiness—she’s always been a bit fickle. This could be Fake Spring. You don’t want to get fooled.
But maybe…? What if Spring is here to sta—
Ah. Winter’s last bow, of course. One last burst of snow. One last dramatic exit.
Goodbye, Winter, you wave absentmindedly.
Spring stifles a laugh. You glance over at her, careful to not stare. You must be coy in your desire.
But then the sun starts to stretch later in the day, its rays slower to disappear behind the trees. Yes. Spring is here to stay.
But then there are those other changes, beyond the shifts in temperature and the first snowfalls and the stretching sunsets. There are individual signs we look for to confirm that nature is turning over. Signs that no one else would understand, but signal to our bodies, and our bodies only, that we have reached the interim periods of the year. Those clues become our own little symbols—the markers of the seasons.
Summer
The absolute freedom of the first few days of Summer vacation, when I am acutely aware of the rarity of having no responsibilities. The calendar’s empty days are almost too much for my brain to compute at one time. Summer is infinite, it seems.
The cool touch of the leather couch against my back, the AC humming in the background, and the crisp crack of a new hardcover book. I’d stay in that spot for hours, feeling more contentment than I thought was possible at any one time.
The silence of morning wake-ups with no alarm. The slow starts as I’d swing my legs over the side of the bed just when I felt like it—not because I was in a rush to get out the door on time.
And then, as the months go on, the antsiness that always crept in when I’d grow restless with the humid heat and the stale schedule. A small part of my mind would think towards September, but I’d stop myself. There is still too much of Summer to relish.
The smell of fried dough that permeates the air as my family arrives, along with the rest of the town, to the grimy lake for the Fourth of July. The rickety rides that squeak as their metal gears move together. I do a casual lap with a friend—this is the mid-Summer check-in with all the peers that you haven’t seen since Spring’s end.
The reverse-Cinderella-effect of my birthday, where the chime of midnight makes me smile. My birthday ushers in the second leg of Summer. And though I am alone at midnight, the magic has begun: for even when I close my eyes to sleep, I have the whole day ahead of me to feel the birthday enchantment that makes everything in the day ever so sparkly.
Spontaneous ice cream outings to that one spot in town where you wait an hour to reach the order window, in long lines filled with every neighbor imaginable, but oh—that first bite is always worth it. So you do it again, and again, and again, all Summer long.
Then, in August, the just-a-hair-shy-of-sterile smell of the office supplies store when going back to school shopping. The pens and pencils I chose were always selected with great thought—they had to glide just right across the page. Every notebook’s color had to correspond to the proper subject, and if a notebook was not college-ruled, I did not want it. August’s relentless heat reminds me that Summer still has one more encore left in it, but as soon as those school supplies arrive home, I have taken one foot and angled it towards what is next:
Fall
Shrieks of laughter from children pumping higher, higher, and higher on the swings at recess, soaking in the last drops of Summer’s warmth. Perhaps if they reach high enough in the sky, they can be the first to touch the leaves stained by the sun’s orange rays.
That early day in the school year that I’d always skip to go move my siblings into college. Waiting anxiously for the day they return home for Thanksgiving.
The holidays off of school when, in a small town, you’d most likely run into people you know anyway just out and about.
My dad breaking out the Halloween decorations. Somewhere along the way, that festive nature went by the wayside, but I can still see the bins of lights and ghouls and goblins being brought up from the depths of the basement. I can still feel the scrape of my nails along the hollow of a pumpkin, scooping out seeds to roast. I can still hear the little tear in the paper stencil when I poked through it to carve a design, followed by the slight squeak of the metal tack as it punctured the pumpkin itself.
Waking up on Thanksgiving morning to the sound of my mom downstairs, padding around the kitchen while she cooks. The smells permeating every inch of the house of savory turkey and sweet apple pie are second only to the perpetual return of feeling like a small kid when I wake up in my bed to the knowledge that she is downstairs creating them.
The golds and oranges and yellows and reds. Apples and leaves and cider donuts and cinnamon, the dust upon everything.
Winter
The first blizzard an invitation to run and jump and build in the powder. That first blanket of snow that sticks is always going to feel like being a little kid, building the tallest snowman imaginable with my sister and dad.
And then, the unique warmth of Winter: heat rushing around me when I step back inside, my mother prepped with a blanket and a steaming mug of hot chocolate—topped with fluff and chocolate drizzle, not marshmallows.
The anticipatory buzz in the air during the last school day before winter break. Teachers and students alike all welcoming the class disruption of candy cane grams and carolers.
A Sunday rehearsal from 1:00-4:00, when all everyone is thinking about is getting home to their Superbowl parties. My mom would pick me up and regale me with details of what is cooking and what is ready all the way home.
February: a perpetual memory of a week-long break from school, wherein I spent every day at school with my favorite people in the world, as our drama club took advantage of the time to rehearse. I’m sure I was tired, but even now, years later, every third week in February, my body remembers only the unbridled joy of a week filled solely with rehearsals and company bondings.
Spring
March. The finish line to the cold months. The precursor to the lightest months. Important dates that we tiptoe around in our cultural memory and ones that have become tender in personal ones. It’s long, yes, but it is an In-Between Month. And I have never hated an In-Between Month.
The first sign of Spring is always going to feel like stepping outside after rehearsal to a sweet, warm breeze swirling around the still-there daylight, rather than emerging to biting winds and white headlights against nighttime.
Enough residual warmth in the air to take an after-dinner stroll. The slight laziness in my step feels all too similar to the slowing down that used to come every Spring, when the pressure of the school year would begin to ease and school became just another place where I could see my friends. There used to be a feather-like weight that came over the formerly-heavy responsibility in the turn from Winter to Spring. I find it’s still how I know things are shifting, even miles and years removed from that time.
Spring’s fresh scent retains the memory of mulch being shoveled in gardens and my family being under one roof. When it would still be light out upon my dad getting home from work, smelling of a corporate job I didn’t quite understand, and somehow the sun’s extra ten minutes allowed us to play catch. It was a time back when I had any interest in throwing a ball around, and even in so many lifetimes removed from that pin-pointed memory, my body has been programmed by the Spring air to remind me of it each year.
Recently, I was reflecting on these markers of the seasons. They feel so potent and so personal that I wondered what other people’s are—surely, we each must have our own versions. Then, on my way to class one day, I overheard a girl chatting with her friend: “Yeah, I just don’t know. It’s hard for me to imagine Summer not in Atlanta. To me, Atlanta is Summer. Even the way it smells. I’ve never not been there for it.”
I thought about a book series whose entire narrative takes place in Summer: “For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers,” the narrator explains.
I thought about the moments when we step outside with friends to a surprisingly crisp night to break up the monotonous heat: “It smells like Fall,” you say with awe.
And, of course, the one and only Lorelai Gilmore of Gilmore Girls who ushers in Winter as soon as she “smells snow.”
The other day in California, it was a gentle, cloudless 70 degree day. It was the type of day that makes you realize Spring is dancing all around, getting ready to move back in—the kind that makes you hope she’s not there for vacation, like she is in Fake Spring, but is there to stay. And for me, it was the exact type of day that belongs to iced coffees and long debriefs with friends when you know you ought to be getting some sort of work done.
Whatever this In-Between season brings for you, I hope it is beautiful. And I hope as the days wind themselves longer and you tiptoe into Spring—or, at the very least, enjoy the stolen warmth of Fake Spring—your own personal markers of the seasons sneak up on you when you least expect them.
And when they do, I hope you tell me what they are.
Happy Fake Spring, friends.