Weather or Not

In the northeast part of the U.S., where I grew up, they've had some weather in the past few days. Snow measured in feet. High winds pulling down power lines. Freezing rain and sleet. It's still winter -- and how. Every year in early March everyone in my hometown hunkers down for the last of it. I used to be one of them.

Where I live now, in Tennessee, it's truly spring already, even if the calendar doesn't admit it. The daffodils have been up for a couple of weeks, hyacinths too. Forsythia spills its yellow froth into the yard, and the tulip trees have all popped pink and white against a cloud-mottled sky. Spring here in the American South feels to me both leisurely and relentless in its pace. It's a long season, with steady battalions of new blooms marching on us every week until we arrive in the heat of summer and the peaches come on. Bradford pear, red bud, weeping cherry, dogwood, iris, azalea, wisteria all unfurl their blossoms and blooms at their appointed times, bold and showy.

Today at church, Father Jean-Baptiste offered his regular first-Sunday-of-the-month benediction to those who have birthdays in the next four weeks. This month, that's me. I was born on the official-by-the-calendar first day of spring, and in the frozen northeast, that was kind of a big deal. We hoped the date truly marked winter's end, but we could never be certain if it would be snowing or if the robins would already be nesting in the bushes just outside the living room windows. Nature had her own plan, and if we'd bet, we would have lost.

But it's early March and already spring in Tennessee, so the official Northern Hemisphere start date for the season on the 20th is just an overdue formality. I intend to go ahead and have a birthday in a few weeks, weather or not. I don't know how many more I'll get to have, and in truth, who ever knows, right?

Still, having late stage cancer can make planning anything in the future, even a very near birthday, feel like an act of hubris. In academia, we begin arranging our courses and ordering our textbooks for the fall term right about now. As I emailed my course preferences off to our department chair this week, I felt like a Yankee in March, hoping for the best, but accepting the uncertainty of the moment. One goes through the familiar and habitual motions of planning something for the future as if mortality were an abstraction, all the while knowing full well that it is not. Plenty of evidence for that. So yes, hubris. But in the weird fun-house mirror of Cancerland, hubris can look an awful lot like hope.