From age 7 ‘til college, I lived in Pensacola, Florida. Pensacola, Florida does not have four seasons. Pensacola, Florida features Relentless Summer from April to November, with an occasional snap of malignant cold sometime between Thanksgiving and Easter.
A few of my sisters were born in or spent their early childhood in Pensacola. These poor kids weren’t familiar with the concepts of leaves changing colors, because in Pensacola, leaves don’t have time to casually tint toward orange. One day they’re green, and the next day some winter cold front viciously copulates with the gulf-side humidity, resulting in a damp cold that bites to the bone. The leaves fall directly off of the trees due to pure fear.
There’s no time for Fall or Spring in Pensacola. The weather is far too busy planning its next ambush.
Nashville, on the other hand, is in a more temperate climate. We have pleasant autumns here. The leaves change to beautiful shades of red and orange, the air has a fresh, dry crispness, we can take long walks outside in hoodies without freezing to death.
Here’s the downside: Spring.
Spring! Where a young man’s fancy turns to love! Where Bambi’s voice changes! Where flowers bloom and winter melts away to life! No! These are lies! Spring is the worst season in the world. By far. Here’s why.
So far this spring, we’ve had no less than four tornado warnings in Nashville. Maybe I’m not used to living in “Tornado Alley”, but in my defense, I thought that alley ran through Kansas or Toledo or something, not Tennessee. Apparently I was wrong. Just today, a tornado ripped through Murfreesboro (Nashville’s kind of weird little brother who doesn’t take enough baths) and killed a woman and her baby. It also carved a very tornadoey swath of destruction across a neighborhood or two.
There were other spring-related things I was planning to complain about in this post, like how it also rains a lot in this “spring” I’ve heard so much about, and the daily high temp swings about 30 degrees daily, but heck, a tornado took some lives today.
Just last week I was on the way to pick up Shannon from work when the weather got so bad that I actually chickened out, pulled over next to a fire hydrant, and took cover in the Big River Brewery downtown. Granted, I ended up having a nice pint while the tornado warning passed, but that’s not the point. Spring isn’t all posies, songbirds, and deer going through puberty. It’s a vengeful, malevolent hellbeast.
