Vernal equinox and springtime at forty-five degrees north

Vernal equinox occurs in Northern Michigan sooner than the end of winter proper. It’s a fact we and others live with amid perennial, invisibilising media campaigns proclaiming spring’s beginning at that moment in March when successive durations of light and dark are equal to one another.

Someone updated a Wikipedia^* article about the spring season on March 25, 2025, shortly before an ice storm interrupted electrical service to so many northern-Midwestern U.S. households that national media took notice.

Michigan’s governor went on to deploy the National Guard to help move fuel and equipment around the state during recovery efforts.

The Wikipedia article’s dovetailing introduction and conclusion provided broad definitions and lists of events both natural and cultural correlating with the spring season. In between, signs and stages were defined more systematically under headings and fields like ecology, astronomy and meteorology.

Photo by Chandra

Etymologically, the word spring arose from Old English and proto-Germanic words meaning to burst forth, to leap or fly up. This is taken to refer primarily to flora in the case of the spring season.

Some North American latitudes may experience a coincidence of vernal equinox and conditions that won’t freezer-burn seedlings the way they are in these climes at those times of year. But certainly not here, no, not in these times.

At forty-five degrees north, more often than not, the season’s first shoots and sprouts become sacrifice to savage temperature changes and sleet, frost and glaze ice. They emerge with the first warm days along with our thong sandals and windbreakers and are dashed along with our premature hopes.

Maybe this year will be different—the exception.

People in Northern Michigan are variably vocal when weather takes sudden turns. Depends on the day, some of us like to say some days. 

Mirroring inconstancy is one way to meet it.

I am an economist about spring and avoid asserting its advent until well after the moment is past. Consensus around the office is that it tends to arrive around these parts definitively, or maybe intuitively, sometime in April.

My “Run for the Trees” Earth Day/Arbor Day run-anywhere 5k race package was delivered either in the evening or morning after Saint Patrick’s Day. Ready or not, here it comes.

Ecologists often divide spring and summer both, ending up with six seasons rather than four.

Meteorologists study weather because before meteors were differentiated from asteroids and comets, the term referred to a host of things so high up as to elude apt description. For assistance differentiating meteors, meteorites and meteoroids, seek a meteoroticist.

Where were we? Oh, right. Happy spring—as soon as it’s here. And a happy whatever this is right now.

* Wikipedia began in 2001 as a website combining the concept of a wiki, an internet hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited, and an encyclopedia.