Spring Is A Feeling

Helsinki, two days ago

Browsing blogs in my WP feed, I’ve been seeing photos of spring in at least Japan, Southern France, and Cyprus. These spring photos are filled with green life, blossoms, and color. They look lovely.

Here, I guess you could say spring has arrived, too.

But it’s a different kind of spring, more subtle. The untrained eye might mistake it for winter. There’s still snow, now colored brown and black from all the dirt that city life brings. There’s still slippery ice on the pavements where you don’t expect it.

The shady side of the street is full of puddles on top of the icy ground. At least it’s evidence of some melting. The newly revealed ground also reveals “surprises” everywhere left behind by dogs and their owners. (Thanks, guys.)

But the sunny side of the street has tiny birds chirping, blue sky, and sun coming at you from a blindingly low angle. After all this darkness, finally light! Soon there will be more and more light, until the sun doesn’t set all night. I prefer 24h of sunlight to 24h of darkness, that’s for sure!

A sure sign of spring here is when you take out your sunglasses. If you can remember where they are. All of the blossoms won’t usually come until May.

There’s still a while to go, but at least blue has now joined the color scheme of what used to be black-grey-and-white all winter. What a joy it is to see blue sky! We now have four colors on our palette!

This spring isn’t as pretty as those flowery pictures, but the feeling is there, in my chest. The butterflies, the sprinkles of energy. We’ll get there. Better late than never.

PS. How can you tell when spring has officially arrived, can you pinpoint the exact moment? A local newspaper said spring might arrive next week – who decides when it has arrived? I can promise you there won’t be any flowers growing in the snow next week. Do they mean it will stop snowing? I know they only want to sell newspapers with their ridiculous headlines, but it made me think. To me, spring is a feeling, more than anything else. An intuitive feeling that winter has finally ended.