The Long Not-So-Good Friday

Thursday was the Vernal Equinox--the official first day of spring.

I didn't do anything to celebrate the occasion, like balance an egg on its point (does anybody really do this?), dance naked (which a friend of mine does for the first day of each new season) or schedule a viewing of Equinox, a relatively obscure, zero-budget horror film that was shot by college students in California, yet had its premiere here in Chicago at the Loop Theater at State and Randolph. (The theater hadn't shown movies for ages, but survived until a couple of years, when it, along with the Walgreens and several smaller shops housed in the same building, were razed to make way for the big glass box that stands there now.)

The only thing I did to mark the occasion was leave comments on a few of my MySpace friends' pages wishing them a "Happy First Day of Spring!" or words to that effect. A number of them, in turn, left similar messages for me.

Of course, this being Chicago, there is usually a striking difference between what it says on the calendar and what's falling from the sky. Thus, on the second day of spring, our fair city (along with much of the upper half of Illinois and lower halves of Wisconsin and Michigan) found itself under a Winter Storm Warning, and I awoke to snow moving sideways past my living room windows. As I walked to work, I crossed a patch of sidewalk on which some artistic child had drawn in pastel shades the message "Spring has sprung" with flowers and stems surrounding it. Mother Nature, though, had other notions.

A Winter Storm Warning, despite its dire name, is not, by any means, a guarantee of snow. Snowstorms are tricky things that sometimes defy prediction--if a storm moves just slightly north or south of where forecasters think it's headed, the precipitation in a given area can be greatly diminished or increased. In this case, had the storm moved, say, 50 miles south, Chicago would have been buried under a foot of snow. As it was, towns north of here had that "honor," while totals varies wildly within the city itself--the North Side took the hardest hit with several inches of heavy, dense snow, while the South Side was barely touched.

Fortunately, it snowed hard enough long enough downtown and was coming down substantially harder and longer elsewhere, for my bosses to spread word that, once our work was wrapped up for the day, we could make a run for it. You don't have to tell me such things twice: Once I was done and made sure nobody else needed me in a support role, I was out the door.

Downtown streets were merely sloppy, with inches of slush accumulating around the curb of each corner, necessitating something along the lines of a ballerina leap across the grayish ponds. Back in my own neighborhood, though, conditions were less than ideal--side streets were unplowed, sidewalks were unshoveled, and the long, slow slog from the train station to La Casa del Terror was longer and slower than usual. Still, it could have been worse--areas within short driving distance had a foot of snow.

Come Saturday morning, the alley behind my building had become a fast-flowing river of ice and slush, and the snow was falling from the swaying boughs in splattering clumps. Welcome to Spring in Chicago.