It’s a welcome relief to be in Oxford for the change in seasons and not just for blossoming flowers and trees. Spring in Madison is like winter in Wisconsin with pollen replacing snow — even without allergies, it’s bad.
Spring is a season of looking forward. Whether that’s toward classes next semester, the house I’m going to live in or the wave of heat that will be this summer — and the planet in the coming decades — my mind tends to drift forward. That’s not to say it’s not also focused on the present. The florae have been waiting for a while to show us their stuff; it’d be rude not to watch. The anxious thoughts of winter become much more productive.
For those of us disposed toward sunlight, the winter months can be long ones. As much as staying up late at night sounds ideal, the 8:30 p.m. sunsets of summer are preferable compared to those same hours in winter.
Seasonal Affective Disorder may not hit us in Mississippi as bad as those towns in the Arctic, where the sun neglects to visit for months at a time; regardless, the lack of sunlight really can take its toll on people’s emotional state.
So, with the sun back in fuller swing and the plants and the birds and the bees joining in God’s orchestra, is everything and everyone all right? No. But, that’s fine. The worries of winter are largely determined by what classes I’m taking or whatever has been cooked up by the causes and circumstances that are the chefs to the stew that is my life. This is true for all situations we find ourselves in. There’s not some astrological predetermination to our lives. Spring may be pretty, but life still has its struggles regardless of how much pollen is or isn’t in the air or whether or not the grass got greener in the Grove over break.
I hope the biggest news the rest of the semester is the ASB election or maybe even the opening of the new section of the Student Union: It would be a welcome change to the Confederate sympathizers of our pre-spring semester.
But those ideas don’t belong to the winter. Spring may be a bit of a biological rebirth so to speak, but winter still marks the beginning of the calendar year. Seasons can affect us, but we’re still people. Our lives continue, or don’t, not because of changes in Earth’s position around the sun, but because of where we were when we started our journeys around it; because of who we share them with; because of what we choose to make the goal of our miniature expeditions. But, hey, spring has sprung. Have a good journey.
Logan Scott is a freshman majoring in film production from Madison.
