Spring Fever in New Hampshire

I and many others who live in New Hampshire have a love-hate relationship with winter. The first snowfalls are always exciting and pretty, the heavy snows of December-February make for great skiing and snowshoeing, and our state relies heavily on winter sports as a source of revenue. However, by March, most of us up here want nothing more than for winter to go away and for it never to come back. March is a hard month because you never can predict what the weather will be like from one day to the next. Spring is tantalizingly close, but bitterly cold days and the occasional snowstorm can pop up here and there. Spring fever is a reality up here, and I’m now starting to believe that I understand where this phrase came from. Let me explain…

Image via Wikipedia

So I was driving home from work today when a big pile of snow flew out from behind a parked car and landed right in front of me in the middle of the road. Once I pulled past the car, I saw that a guy was standing in his yard with a snow shovel, and he was shoveling the snow off of his lawn and throwing it into the street. Now I want spring to arrive as badly as anyone else, but shoveling one’s lawn is going a bit far if you ask me. He at least could have rolled out the snowblower to do the job a bit more quickly. It’s also not uncommon up here to see guys (it’s almost always the guys) chopping ice off of their driveways with garden shovels once it starts to get warm out (I am admittedly guilty of this myself, though I prefer to use an axe). It’s almost as if we don’t realize that a few more warm days will do the job for us with a lot less effort. I honestly think sometimes that people up here would pay for a snow-melting service to come through with a giant blow-dryer to annihilate the remaining piles of muddy snow in their yards.

So yes, spring fever seems to be pathological in NH, and it hits every year right around mid-March. I’m not even going to mention what it does to my dog.