Springtime in Portland: Reluctantly Celebrating the Signs of a New Season

Every year, I tell my friends - and neighbors, and strangers, and, most fervently, myself - that this sunshine, this greening, this blossoming of the city of Portland is a trick. I say it's mean, cold-hearted trick known emphatically as Fake Spring, a phenomenon which draws us in year after year, luring us with daffodils and cherry blossoms. I climb up on my Dr. Bronner's soap box and preach the dangers of optimistically starting those raised beds and staring too long from the office window at the brightness outside. This is a specter of a new season. This is a trap. We're coddled with temperatures in the fifties, drawn out to play Frisbee in the streets, and warmed like sleepy lizards by the sun, only to fall heavily back into rain, chill, and frost for a few more months. A truly mean trick. And every year, without fail, I fall for it.

After a certain amount of staunchly promising myself I'll hold off, after weeks of avoiding the 's' word despite all the conversations that inevitably turn towards the appearance of crocuses and blossoms, I give in. Who really wants to be the Scrooge that insists this is an apparition? I manage to forget the freezing memory of the rain that inevitably dampens the first few weeks (months...) of the Farmers' Market, I block out the frost that kills the first crop, and I somehow completely erase the concept of Junuary, that horrible, horrible pre-summer gloom. I ignore history, because days like today are too gorgeous to be spent covering my eyes in a last-ditch attempt at pyschological self preservation. So, in complete acknowledgment of the fact that in a few weeks time I'll return to cuddling my Vitamin D deficiency like a puppy, jilted yet again by this false hope of an end to the greys, I give you the first beautiful signs of Spring.

Oh, Portland, you will break my heart.