Spring arrives with a bang!

Katie D.

April 25, 2010 - 4:27 PM

Friends and readers, it is a gorgeous day. Truly I tell you, there is nothing much better than spring in Eugene. There are flowers everywhere: tulips, lilacs, flowering trees, rhododendrons of every color, rosemary, and pansies. Everywhere. Flowers grow here like weeds do at home: with wild abandon, and often without apparent effort.

I love it.

It is nearly seventy degrees. After a full winter of gray days and rain, it is such a wonderful thing to look out the window and see blue skies. There are birds everywhere, and all the windows are open. There is such a distinct and powerful smell of spring and growing everywhere I've been today.

With the sun, out come the college students. We emerge from behind our books, step out of the library, throw off our shoes and hit the quad. Instead of being an open strip of grass to be crossed as quickly as possible while hustling from one class to another, the quad was instantly transformed into a place to linger, to lounge. I spent an hour on Friday sitting in the grass and talking with three girls I hadn't really spoken with in more than a year. It was nice to catch up, but let me guarantee that it wouldn't have happened on a rainy day. There is a feeling of freedom inherent in sun and fresh-mown grass.

Of course, the feeling of spring is tempered by the pile of work to be done. Yesterday I didn't even set foot out of doors: instead I pounded out twelve pages of thesis. My first draft stands at almost sixty pages, and I imagine the full first draft will be more than ninety. It was a great feeling to accomplish that much of my project, but now I'm feeling more and more that my place it outside, even as I eye my ever-growing "to do" pile.

I shouldn't exaggerate too much. I'm actually feeling pretty calm about my thesis, and all my other projects. I'm coping well, and have dealt with some recent turbulence in various projects with relatively good form. It's all going to get done, but that blue sky...

The good news is that I have a bunch of reading this term, and I can sit and soak up the rays while doing my homework. Not quite as fun as simply spending the time "in the free air," as you would say in Spanish, but it is an excuse to be outside. At this time of the year, I also will start waking up an extra twenty minutes early and walking the almost two miles to school, rather than riding the bus. It is a gorgeous walk that includes the Masonic cemetery, which is one of my favorite places in Eugene. Instead of staring out the bus window while the same houses slide by (albeit newly adorned with leafing trees and blossoming shrubs), I will be wandering through the old trees and wildflowers in a beautiful old graveyard. Some of the grass is taller than my knees already, and so lush!

In Colorado, the trees have barely leafed. Which is good, because it snowed more than a foot two days ago.

Eugene is a beautiful place to be a student. This is true all year long, but especially true in April. The winter rains are still with us, both in recent memory and in threatening weather forecasts. But today I can put on some shades, bundle up my reading, and head to the back yard to watch the birds and scoot around the tree shadows. Even better, my friends just called me for some backyard Zumba! That's worth delaying the thesis for.