Loose Ends: New name for season needed

Spring has become un-sprung. After the yearly calendar’s declaration of the first day of the season more than a week ago, one would think that signs of the green and growing season would appear. There is a problem with that expectation here. Calling the season directly after winter by its given name should be outlawed.
While the four seasons do appear, the time periods allotted to each season’s length differs from the yearly calendar’s demarcations. The first day of spring is recognized on March 20, yet nothing resembling that season appears here until late April or early May. The last frost of the winter season usually happens in mid-May, but there have been a few years that it has extended into early June.
A glance at the newspaper’s classified advertisements gives a clue or two about the calendar’s timetable confusion. The White River Winter Rendezvous hosted by the Meeker Sportsman’s Club took place a week after the official declaration of spring’s arrival. An ad placed by The Seamstress encouraged prospective clients to “think warm” and “dig out the closets for the shorts and t-shirts that might need mending.” Her innovative and practical solution to the lack of cooperation from Mother Nature encouraged the readers to “at least wear them around the house.” The Pistol River Leather shop backed up the idea of thinking spring with the little notation that “winter went out (hopefully) with a bang. Time for green grass.”
Two advertisements for volunteer help by the ERBM Recreation District in the past two weeks stated that the summer job starts in mid-May. The local expectation is that spring makes its brief appearance somewhere between April and the middle of May. Suddenly it is summer and it never felt like spring.
Too many people rely on the depiction of spring with buds blooming, green grass and warm weather. Green may be spring’s official color but white continues to cover all that green throughout the post-winter period.
It’s about time a more appropriate moniker for that brief period of time be used. In this era of political correctness, quite a few old familiars have fallen out of favor. A contest sponsored by a local organization could come up with some new names for this transitional time between winter and summer. Combinations of the more traditional seasons might be a thought. Wintpring, anyone?