The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I was hammering away at an essay in Spanish class the other day when half the class suddenly shut down their computers, gath­ered their books, and filed out the door.

At first, I was curious, but then I had a flashback from the previous year's second semester - a handful of kids on the auditorium stage dancing with invisible actors as the teacher read the lines of seven absent classmates.

Spring sports, it would seem, are now upon us - along with, perhaps more shockingly, spring itself.

Yesterday, I bought a new pair of flip-flops and was actually able to wear them out of the store. It was about seventy degrees outside, and I felt perky enough to drag my mother across the street to the bead shophellip;and then to Del Taco for dinnerhellip;and then to Home Depot to buy some potted flowers.

It occurred to me that night, as I sat curled up in the living room making my fifth butterfly necklace of the evening, that a little bit of the audacious optimism of the coming season was seeping into my mood.

This morning, our dish­washer started spewing smoke. Thankfully for the contents of our newly re- floored kitchen, the home's previous owner had accu­rately labeled the switches in the fuse box.

As most of our bowls had been washing at the time of the incident, I ate my morn­ing Cheerios out of a coffee mug and contentedly sa­shayed off to plant our newly acquired flowers.

Perhaps most incredibly of all, we are two-thirds of the way through the school year. As an eleventh grader, I should know better than to get visably perky at such news, especially as every day that passes means that I'm palpably closer to the abrupt lifestyle shift known as "college". And yet, up to my elbows in classwork and swamped with scholar­ship deadlines, the kid in me couldn't help but smile as one of my tablemates an­nounced that we only had fifty-eight school days left before summer vacation. I have to keep reminding myself that it's not techni­cally spring yet, and that the weather around here is in the nasty habit of tantalizing us with a few days of pre- Equinox sunshine and then remaining sulkily overcast until midway through April. At that point, the Touchet Valley will waste no time in becoming a veritable oven.

So why is it that despite having lived through so many years of this, we con­tinue to expect a sunny, se­rene, mosquito-less season of balmy weather and but­terflies?

My lead theory - which made sense to both of the parakeets I explained it to - is that spring is almost as much a state of mind as a state of the earth's tilt. We wear pastels and capri shorts and magnesite but­terfly necklaces despite the fact that it may be pouring barrels outside. We plant flowers and quietly hope that that last unexpected frost snap was the last one until September.

In the meantime, though, we have a few sunny days ahead of us. I'll wear my shorts if you'll wear yours.