It is spring. The calendar says so. We may not feel like the climate is treating us justly, once again, or we may have the sneaking suspicion that the calendar has lied to us just like our bathroom scale. Feelings are often gullible, however, and just as likely to mislead us as any faulty GPS system purchased from a cagey salesman dealing out of the trunk of a car with no visible license plate.

It is spring. The signs here in Wisconsin are unmistakable. The robins have returned. The geese are doing their flyovers. The daytime temperature gets above freezing and the nighttime temps never go below zero. Snowfall is wet and heavier than the winter storms. It is more likely to stick to the trees, melt a little in the daylight and then create hazardous ice conditions in time for the morning commute. And who can mistake the appearance of road construction signs on the side of the road, indicating that once the ice is gone our travel times will actually increase as we detour down unknown side roads or are forced to wait for the heavy equipment to casually yield the right-of-way rights to those of us who have some place important to go or actual work to do.

It is spring, the time for our annual do overs. Nature is renewing itself, so we are certainly justified in doing the same. Only our renewal is an attempt at remediation. The management of nature we cultivate in our own yards is never quite the achievement we want it to be. The arrival of warmer temperatures temp us with the pleasures of leisure activities that are so joy much more enjoyable to bask in than the sweat equity of pruning, planting, mulching and mowing that hold the promise of constructing our garden paradise.

It is spring and the pleasure domes designed for us modern day Kubla Khans can already boast of green grass forming in the elysian fields of right, left and center, chalk lines to warn us away from foul territory and surrogates to do the sweating for us as they throw, catch, hit, run and argue with the god of home plate.

Ah, spring. It is the long awaited season for do overs, correcting our landscaping misdeeds of prior years. It is a time to invest in garden tools that may never touch dirt, fertilizer that will never be spread, and plastic flowers that will never die due to replace what we could not grow. Tis the true season to be jolly as we do over the same mistakes we made last year, when we yielded to sumptuous indulgence while working on our tans by the pool, ocean or lake. We only need to make sure that the Sun Protection Factor of our chosen sunscreen has the right numeric value to offer us the best defense against the unremitting, unrelenting performance of the sun’s UVA and UVB rays. Otherwise we will find ourselves overdone with the promise of wrinkling, sagging, leathering and other light-induced effects gained from enjoying the great outdoors.

Ah, spring.