Spring is undoubtedly the season in which to live a second childhood. Hot sun heats your back while caressing breezes cool the skin of your face and tease your hair to wild, snakelike proportions. After a forty-below Canadian winter, spring is soft-warm and calm-cool. With lengthening days and lighter ways, spring breeds the carefree spirit needed for a child’s summer without the commitment to monotonous heat and baking sunlight.

As the snow first begins to sweat and agglomerate into sticky clumps, you and your siblings play at battle or build towns that are ripe for destruction by mittened and pink-cheeked Godzillas. Spring is a season of newly budding bushes, shattered ice flows on the river and birds that are homeward bound to tickle your eardrums with each piping melody. And when the drowsy patches of winter-browned grass begin to peek out from under their snow blanket, you know it is time to search the woods for the first crocuses.

If this lucky streak of sun continues, the snow’s timeline will run out, and all will melt into cool puddles and crisp icebergs for your plastic dinosaurs and Tonka trucks. So at long last, your feet are free of heavy winter boots and your body of a constraining snowsuit. You shed that thick skin and imagine that the cold air doesn’t chill you, give you goosebumps. After all, the fresh air may still be sharp, but it is free of buzzing pests and no longer carries the frigid bite of winter.

Mud wallows are perhaps even more wonderfully compelling than the wetter, warmer weather. The earthy, brown smell calls to you while equivocating away all sense of danger or dirty clothes. It promises good, clean fun. What child has never made a mud pie or lost one rubber boot to a squelching sea of gleaming mud?

Spring is truly the season of youth because the world around the child is fresh and young to match. Green things break the monotony of white, and mud calls to each child’s bare foot. Deceptive sunlight steals the will for a winter coat and so inflicts a chill while murky puddles pull at the imagination. Yes, spring, you are the season for the young to play at life.

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Amanda Slinger / Copy Editor