In Celebration of Spring (and a Long Weekend)!

It’s Memorial Day weekend–the unofficial start of summer–and what better way to celebrate those who have lost their lives pledging to support and defend the Constitution of the United States than by taking a Monday off? Sure, the day off is nice, but it really just shifts Monday to Tuesday, and Monday on a Tuesday is the WORST.

The unofficial start of summer is bittersweet for me, because it marks the coming of the end of spring. A lot of people list summer or fall as their favorite season, and some nutballs even say winter, but spring is mine. Here in Northern Nevada (that’s where I live, y’all), I recognize the beginning of spring when two things occur (and they usually happen around the same time): 1) the scotch brooms in my front yard bloom; and 2) my husband insists on opening every window in the house, ostensibly so we can smell the scotch brooms, but mostly because he has hot boiling blood running through his veins and is “hot” even though its only sixty-five degrees outside and I need to wear a sweater in the house. All this usually happens around our wedding anniversary on the first of May, which is good for my husband, because I am too overcome with sentimentality–and also too cold–to kill him.

The beautiful weather holds for a week or two, then we have a mid- to late-May (though it has happened as late as June) cold snap. Usually it happens right before Memorial Day so everyone freezes at their barbecues, but this year it happened last week. And even though it happens every year, every year Northern Nevadans complain about it.

“I just put out my tomatoes and now they’re dead!” You think you’d learn not to put your tomatoes in until after Memorial Day.

“Ugh, can you believe this weather?” Well, yes I can, and you should, too. Pretend like you live here, for fuck’s sake. I obviously have very little patience for complaints about our lovely, unmedicated bipolar spring weather.

Immediately following our cold snap, we have another week or so of nice weather, then–BAM!–summer is here and it’s hot as balls. Seriously. Next week is supposed to be in the nineties for a few days, then temperatures will bounce around for a bit, before every day in late June and early July (except for Independence Day, which will be nice but windy so fireworks are postponed until almost ten o’clock) is ninety-plus degrees. Sometimes for fun, we top one hundred degrees and we’re all certain it’s hotter than the surface of the sun. Good times. And every good Northern Nevadan will tell you historically it has snowed here in every month but August. I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of this statement, but when you’ve seen a snow flurry in July, it feels true.

I don’t usually complain too much about the heat. Yeah, it’s hot, but if you’re lucky you only have to be out in it long enough to get from your car into a nice, air-conditioned building, where a sweater is required because it’s freezing. I know it’s terribly cliché to say, but at least it’s a dry heat, so we’re just baking, not melting. One year, my daughter qualified for a national gymnastics meet in Tennessee at the end of June and we have never been so miserable. People who live in the desert are not meant to suffer through that kind of humidity. The fire alarm at our hotel went off one morning at nine a.m., and we evacuated to the parking lot, where we sweltered in ninety degree heat with seventy percent humidity. At nine a.m. It may not sound terrible, but when you’ve lived your whole life in a place where mornings are invariably chilly and anything higher than twenty percent humidity feels unbearably muggy, ninety degrees at seventy percent is stifling.

So I will thoroughly enjoy this last hurrah of my lovely Northern Nevada spring weather. I will revel in the heavenly smell of my scotch brooms, before they drop their blossoms, and we have to trim them at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning because it’s too hot to do it later in the day. I will marvel at the green hillsides before the sagebrush turns brown from the heat and lack of water. And all too soon it will be late summer, and my daughter will start her senior year, and next spring I might be too busy thinking about that late-school year senior stuff like graduation (*SNIFF*) to really enjoy it. But this year has been delightful, as it is every year.

I wish all of you a safe and happy Memorial Day weekend, filled with things that make you happy.