Busting Out

If you've ever seen Sir David Attenborough's stunning "Planet Earth," you might recall the footage of the Arctic. More specifically, you might remember the sight of a massive, smooth slope of snow unbroken by any trace of life, until, quite unexpectedly, a polar bear pokes out a paw and then a nose and blinks into the light of day. This polar bear has been hibernating, but spring has come at last. It's time to wake to the big, wide world and do those things that polar bears do all day long.

Substitute the flat, heavy, deadening blanket of an overheated Florida summer for that chilly slope, put my lumbering self in the place of that surprisingly agile bear and you have me, this morning, running around Crescent Lake Park. Why, what's this? My shoulders straightened a bit. I breathed in air that didn't stick on the way down. I felt stray, sweaty hairs lift in a slightly cooler breeze and I knew.  It's coming.  IT.  The other half of the year wherein the electricity doesn't come from the too-near lightning of a raging tropical downpour but, rather, from the energizing sparkle of dry-air static and easy breathing and the getting done of things. My whole being blinked.

Now, I've lived here for three decades and have seen more than a few Thanksgivings with temperatures around the 90-degree mark. The heat isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But that little breeze was a reminder that, amidst the chaos of the everyday, our planet is just chugging along on its regular path and is finally—finally!—coming around to what I selfishly esteem The Good Half of the Orbit. All this nonsense about wet and dry seasons; the reality of that orbit 'round these parts is that you have the Doing Season and the Wilting Season, and it is finally time to get up off the fainting couch and get busy.

Perhaps it's no wonder that Florida is an odd place, given that we bust out of the proverbial snowbank just as so much of the nation gets ready to hibernate under it. We have a peskily inconvenient latitude for a northern hemisphere country. We're like the third shift of the nation, always off the regular schedule and wondering why we can't find fried chicken when everyone else is eating breakfast cereal.

For me, I'm just happy that the alarm has gone off and I recognized, as I do every year around now in my own annual processional, that it's time to wake up.  After the long sleep of summer, it's an exciting feeling not only to want to get things done, but also to feel like you can find the energy to do them.