There is, I’m sure, a specific word to describe the feeling I had yesterday when standing outside in a t-shirt and pants — no sweater, no jacket, no hat — basking in the sun and actually, honestly, swear-to-god feeling the warmth of the sun on my head and shoulders and realizing that, maybe really honestly, the winter is coming to an end.
In younger days, I embraced the cold and the overcast; sometimes, I even appreciated the rain, although growing up in the west coast of Scotland, that wasn’t something I did that often. The summer and, more importantly, the idea of enjoying sunshine and warmth was something that I had definitively decided was Something That Other People Did. Not for me, the t-shirt weather of even San Francisco in the summer; I’d ride the bus downtown to work and grimace at the sun in the sky, squinting when it got in my eyes.
Portland, then, felt like a godsend when I arrived. The weather here was just like I’d grown up with, after all, with actual seasons after almost a decade of generic, unchanging Bay Area pleasantness. Within weeks of getting here, there was a snowstorm that I was in no way prepared for, and I was thrilled to freeze my backside off upon discovering that.
Maybe it’s just the increasing length of the winters that have changed that — I’m fairly sure that March marked the changeover from winter to spring when I first got here, although that might be an entirely faulty memory at work — or simply the reality of getting older and less tolerant of atmospheric conditions that are, let’s be blunt, uncomfortable and not entirely enjoyable to anyone with a lick of sense. Nonetheless, just as seasons change, so has my response to said seasons. I may not be becoming a summer person just yet, but I’m at least making it to spring.
That said, it’s gone from high 70s and sunny yesterday to low 50s and blustery today, so perhaps the weather is trying to tell me not to get too comfortable just yet.