Today is the Spring Equinox, the first day of Spring*. It’s the season when people have honoured various deities: Aphrodite from Cyprus, Hathor from Egypt, Ostara of Scandinavia, and others. Here in Brookline, Massachusetts it’s a beautiful, sunny day, around 48°F or 9°C. It’s really bright out, in part because the sun is reflected off the high banks of snow left by the snowploughs. In such circumstances, it seems almost churlish to note that the weather forecast for tonight and tomorrow calls for snow….
Oh no, not MORE bloody snow!!!
OK, I’ll stop whining. I really will. It’s a beautiful day, and the snow won’t amount to anything, and the first robins have appeared…. **
* However when I was growing up, I was taught to reckon these things by the month. So winter was December, January and February, while spring included March, April and May. C’est la vie.
** Robins. That’s another thing that’s hard to wrap my head around. Back in England, robins were these cute (yet fierce) little birds that were resident the year round; many Christmas cards included pictures of “robin red-breast” in the snow. (Obvious religious connotations.) Here in the US, robins are simply a variety of thrush, with vaguely rust-coloured breasts, and they’re wimps when it comes to severe weather. I find it hard to think of them as robins. Hmmm: perhaps this was all part of a fiendish plan by the first professors of Philosophy at Harvard back in the 17th century: they wanted to set up an ambiguous referential situation for their lectures on cognition. “Consider the mental representation robin. In England, this refers to…”. Cue Jerry Fodor (closely followed by Dan Dennett).