This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’m going to just come out and say it. Spring is my least favorite season. I don’t like it. I don’t like the cold. Or the wind. But most of all, the brown.

Actually, most of all, the cold. Or the wind. I can’t decide.

Here’s the thing.

I’m always about 10 degrees colder than everyone else, and during no time of year is this more uncomfortable than spring in Minnesota.

You might think my ever-chilled condition would feel the worst in winter—and, yes, in some cases it does. But in winter, you aren’t trying to pull off a bright and cheery aesthetic that requires cute shoes and bare ankles. In winter, you aren’t yet sick to death of your wool sweaters and Ugg boots. In winter, you aren’t SITTING OUTSIDE ON A LAWN CHAIR watching your kids play sports.

In spring, you are.

Several years ago I bought a full-length down parka for $14.99 at the thrift store. It reaches past my knees and has a furry Eskimo hood. It’s the opposite of fashionable. I call it my sleeping bag coat. And, although I live in a climate that can reach wind chills of 40 degrees below zero, the only times I’ve needed this coat are when it’s 40 degrees above zero (and windy) at my son’s baseball or ultimate frisbee games.

This is my point.

But also THERE’S the brown.

Oh, mercy. The brown. My daughter, who experiences life in metaphors, heard a song lyric last week that compared rainy days to depression. “That’s just wrong,” she told me. “Rain isn’t depression. Rain is sadness. Endless days of gloomy skies and brown earth—that’s depression. Anyone who’s ever been depressed knows that.”

I have to agree. I’m as sensitive to visuals as I am to temperatures, and trying to find a beautiful place for my eyes to land in early spring is a challenge. Visually (for me, at least ) it’s the definition of depressing.

When kindergarten teachers hold up pictures of spring for their students, it’s all tulips and daffodils and yellow, fluffy chicks. Which is cute, but it’s also confusing. Because here in Minnesota, we don’t see any of that fun stuff until weeks and weeks into spring. Meanwhile, we’re slogging through the no-man’s-land of early spring, where every bush, tree, and blade of grass is brownish grayish brown. It’s endless, lifeless muck littered with dead leaves, dog poop, and actual litter as far as the eye can see—often intensified by the gray gloom of a stubborn blanket of clouds.

It’s like someone drained out all the color and turned the visual appeal down to “sorry, not today.”

AT The end of the tunnel

But do you know what it is that wakes up the trees and calls out the blossoms at winter’s end? It’s not the warmer weather. It’s the light.

When all of those dormant living things begin to sense longer days and shorter nights, the miracle of rebirth is set into motion. Long before we see even a hint of green, life is returning, within the woody wombs, beneath the dark earth, just under the surface.

For me, that is the saving grace of spring.

First, the light. The days stretching their length in both directions, gradually offering more and more sun at warmer and warmer angles.

Then, the hope. The certainty that, although I can’t see it, or feel it (yet!), transformation is happening—and if I can simply trust the process, the payoff will come. The green will return. The world will bloom. And my toes will once again sink into a lush carpet of grass. One day soon.

WORTH THE WAIT

The thing about spring is it’s just so dang elusive. That is probably what I dislike about it most. Spring requires patience—right at the moment when you have none left. The anticipation can be torturous, the tease relentless, the wait tantalizing.

Spring begins as a date on the calendar and we are told it has arrived long before any real sign of it actually appears. But I, too, have been in that position. I have, at times, been named something before I can fully own that reality. I’ve been called an adult before I acted like one, a mother before I felt like one, a valuable person before I believed I was one.

And so is spring. Spring is now, and it’s not yet. It’s here, and it’s coming. It’s dead, and it’s just about to burst forth into full, beautiful life.

Which brings me back to brown. Because maybe the color of leafless trees and lifeless grass might actually be the color of hope and rebirth and good things to come.

And maybe I can learn to love it for all the potential it holds.

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Julie Rybarczyk

Julie Rybarczyk is a freelance writer, fair-weather blogger, and empty-nester mama who’s living alone and liking it . She’s perpetually the chilliest person in Minneapolis—so most of the year you’ll find her under layers of wool, behind steaming cups of tea. Or on the socials at @shortsandlongs.