I am not decisive about Spring, except that it’s a season, and as long as three months can be long. If a February day feels all Spring and a March day feels all Winter, Spring has the flotational quality a season has when it is not just an interval of time, but a state of mind.

A Chameleons album, “Script of the bridge,” begins with a man softly quoting Sophocles: “In his Autumn before the Winter, comes man’s last, mad, surge of youth.” The beginning of an excellent album.

“What on earth are you talking about?!” protests his mother. It’s from a British TV show.

There we have the poignancy of life, that the mindset of WInter is present in Autumn to a man who has not yet cut himself off from his personal Springtime and to the Summer that the cycle of life would have recently ended. 

When we change the clocks twice a year, one despairs of beleagured integrity holding onto its rightful place in the world. Not rarely do we see hard numbers rounded off, intricate philosophies reduced to slogans, but beneath the easily tarnished surface perseveres the resilient bedrock of empirical reality.

The Earth goes around the Sun, and the way we tilt decides the length of daylight all around the globe. Equatorial peoples have an experience of the Sun, and daylight, decidedly different from polar folk, with variances in between.

So we have equinoxes and solstices, themselves overlapping over areas which include places with slightly different schedules. This year’s vernal equinox arrived March 20th at 9:57am, although Monday the 17th, the Sun rose at 7:17am and set at 7:17pm. That was the local equinox, and a good example why St. Patrick’s Day is another good choice for first day of Spring.

When the Sun sets after 7:00, that is not Winterish, but with the latest adjustments to Daylight Savings Time, we now have that extra hour of daylight arriving in Winter. 

March is not synonomous with Winter, although most of the month falls within Winter. June doesn’t seem Spring, September doesn’t seem like Summer, December doesn’t seem like Autumn. Although the symptoms of seasons overlap, and someone’s experience of the weather of a day will correspond to their idea of exactly what conditions exemplify the experience of a particular season.

March 20th seems an arbitrary time to begin Spring, but it’s the soundest science. It’s not an emotional decision, an agricultural construct, or a convenience to a year’s calendar. Spring arrives when the Earth is at its point in the orbit when this part of the Earth begins having the amount of daylight that indicates that the conditions of long nights and dormant earth are over.

Spring is cherry blossoms and thunderstorms, and, officially, the most precise equations of deepest, darkest, interstellar science!