Flirting With Spring
The cold air's arrived and Boston's flirtation with warm, spring-like weather has ended. Cold tonight, and tomorrow, and perhaps some sleet and freezing rain on into Friday. This after a chilling-to-the-bone snow whipped winter. This after days of nonstop rain and only day or so of ice-cream weather. And you know, I really think that whiplash change of elements is kind of cool, maybe a bit psychically cruel, especially if one leaves the house in warm weather clothing and then has to shiver their way home at night.

As much as I really want to see a string of days where it's possible to walk comfortably barefoot in the squishy-cool damp grass of a newly green spring lawn, the kind you get on that day when suddenly the trees have budded and the crocuses and tulips startle your vision, as much as I want that, I don't mind these flirtations with warmth followed by the return of cold and dreary skys.

Weather should be coy. It's one of New England's charms, that weather changes by the minute.

And too, there's something not-dreary about otherwise dreary weather. There's beauty in the gray and fog of rain, the drenching cold of sleet, especially if you're dressed right for it and are out it in the weather on foot. And really especially if you can walk in the woods, or across an open field, away from sidewalks that hug traffic, away from sidewalks where the pedestrian is so easily beseiged by walls of water when cars speed through those long thick puddles that collect at the road's edge.