The First Day of Spring

I've never been one to really pay attention to the actual start of any given season. Seeing as the weather is really what's important about a particular season, and it is apt to change with little pre-meditation, a single particular date on the calender becomes increasingly irrelevant. I know, I know about length of days and the solstices, but again those don't effect my life, whereas raging blizzards and floods do.

My experience in Minneosta has shown me that the transitions from Winter to not Winter and vis-a-versa are extremely important. Everybody has different things they do to prepare or recover from months of cold and white. Such activities are so established I would say they resemble a sort of ritual. "Spring cleaning" is what parents call it, as they order their kids to pick up all their once buried toys from the yard, but my personal ritual for spring time doesn't really involve all that much cleaning. For instance, two days ago the sun was shining. I walked outside with keys, put one in the ignition and turned the tired old 1980 Kawasaki KZ250 over a few times. This amazed me, because I neglected to remove the battery when I also neglected to put this bike in the garage.

Picking up my once buried toy, and dragging it out of the snow bank was a chore, and I wasn't really hoping to accomplish anything at this time. It was just a whimsical curiousity of the day. A few minutes later with a charger set to engine start, the bike cranked hard and started to fire. Old gas, no stabalizer, and a soaked air filter, yet still she started.

And so my first day of spring was marked by a back firing bike taking me down to the gas station on out of balance snow encrusted tires. The bank said 25 degrees and there were hoards of people standing outside the Dairy Queen. I guess some people eat ice cream, but I just go get gas.