Well, sort of. After a confused groundhog predicted it would be an early spring, March came in like lion and out…like a lion. The first few weeks of April weren’t much better.

If you live in a state like Tennessee or Alabama, you know summer starts creeping in around March, making the next three months a meteorological wrestling match in which warm weather usually triumphs.

This year, it seems  like everyone was particularly eager for the idyllic 3-4 week transition from cold to warm called “spring” that we all have in our minds, in which cherry blossoms bloom, trees bud, birds chirp and the grass blows in the gentle breeze. Instead, spring breakers in mid-March were greeted by sleeting temperatures in the 40s. Followed by a frigid Easter, in which it snowed two days earlier. The first two weeks of April were then a string of windy, partly cloudy, 40s, 65, 37, pelting sleet, 85 degrees and a monsoon. There was a cry of outrage from cubicles to college students, high schoolers and retirees ready to put in the sailboat – “Who stole my spring?”

And even though spring in our state has never really looked like that (I hear up north there is a tidy one-month transition from cold to hot), somehow we still feel entitled to the idea of two months of cheerful, balmy days that we were promised when we made tissue paper Easter eggs and chickens in grade school and learned our seasons.

And then I thought, if life were a month on the calendar, it would probably be March. Or April.

We expect sunny skies but get wind on one day, sunshine the next, clouds, rain, more rain, sun, and sometimes hail pelting through our tidy plans of a walk in the park. We are left confused, like the Bradford pear trees standing resolutely in the flurries of snow. Thunderstorms disappoint us. Warm days tease us. And just when we think we’ve got it figured out, a tornado appears out of nowhere.

Spring should be a lesson to us all – you can’t control life any more than you can control spring.

Get out the flip-flops, then go digging for a heavy sweater you just put away.  Roll out the barbeque grill, then go grab the lawn chairs before they blow off the deck in a monsoon.

Predict the unpredictable, for spring is in the air.

Or perhaps that’s just the pollen.