Spring Overshoot

Every second or third spring we get a serious case of temperature overshoot. Week after frigid week creeps by in February and March, when we crave warm weather—much as kids impatiently wait for Santa to drop by with his load of goodies. Then in late March or early April, those warmer days finally arrive and we revel in their luxury. But even before we get a chance to enjoy the pleasantness, the temperature slides on up past cordial to somewhere near tropical. From chilly 50s to pleasant 70s, then on into the nasty 90s.

It’s not fair! We’ve far too quickly morphed from shivering to sweltering. A couple of brief days of delight get sandwiched between two disagreeable extremes. Besides it being unfair, the body can’t adjust that quickly. Come July, I can endure 94 degrees pretty decently. But the 94 we had today… in early April?? Whoa!

But the problem with spring’s overshoot goes far beyond our physical uncomfortableness. It even goes beyond the sadness of watching flowers wilt and die well before their time. (In cooler weather, they’d last a couple of weeks, not a measly two days.) The hardest part is watching all the fruit trees pop into bloom one afternoon—knowing that a night of killing frost is surely coming. We can pretty well count on a 26-degree night in the next few days, when all those vulnerable blossoms will get zapped by Jack Frost, die, and turn a ghastly brown the next day. It seems so unnecessary. Why must the weather make these wild swings? Why does it so sneakily lure the buds open, only to kill them the next day?

Mother Nature can seem cruel, but it’s mostly our perception that reads motives into natural events. A gorgeous sunset does not intend to please us. A drought is not our punishment. An earthquake has no malevolence in it. It just is. Our suffering is caused more by doing things like building houses in a flood plain or planting a delicate cherry tree that is susceptible to frost.

Oh well, so we lose a cherry or peach or pear crop every two or three years. But those other years… oh, how sweet their fruit is! Besides, we planted a backup years ago: strawberries. They’re smart enough to blossom later, when all the frosts have passed.