Springtime comes to Luzhou

Smalltalk about the weather is universal. Of course, in China, the weather is secondary to the chit-chat topic of choice (food), but people still always have something to say about the sun, the rain, the heat or the cold. For a while in late February, all anyone could talk about was the coming of spring. "Maybe tomorrow," was what I was frequently told--"maybe tomorrow it'll be spring." And at last, the seasons have turned and the most fleeting of them all is here and already almost gone. I was warned, almost direly, that spring is very short, and it seems indeed true. One morning, after a particularly chilly day in early March, I woke to sunshine and birdsong outside my window. From then on, the temperatures continued to warm and life just got a whole lot better. Now, it is consistently 70 degrees in the afternoon and the skies have been blue more often than not in the past month. One day last week, it was so warm that my students begged me to turn on the air conditioner (they are luckily in the audiovisual classroom, which is equipped with AC to battle the combined heat of students, computers and the sun come early summer). We did end up turning it on, and I was amazed that it was necessary during the first week of April.

Signs of spring are clear. Women start wearing their new clothes purchased during the long winter holiday, and they carry umbrellas to guard their skin against the sun. White skin is prized here, and they try to urge it along with "whitening cremes" for the face and body. Men of a certain age roll up their shirts, exposing their bellies to the fresh air on hot days. People actually take off their coats sometimes. The late winter pineapple, purchased in sections on a stick for 1 kuai, have been replaced by mangos in the markets. Here in Luzhou, at the convergence of the Yangtze and Tuo Rivers at the center of town, people fly kites on the riverbank. It is a lovely time, when the collective populace breathes a sigh of relief that winter is finally gone, and summer hasn't quite lit it's blazing fires.

As a volunteer here, I was probably happier than the average citizen to see the spring this year. It has meant that I have finally put away my thermal underwear (my constant companion throughout the winter), my windows can now be open to the sunshine, and my mood has lifted with the exit of the oppressive winter. It was very tough to survive the persistent cold this winter. Unless I was moving very briskly, under several blankets in bed or squarely in front of my space heater, I was never warm. Now, having done it once, I feel like I can do it at least one more time. Plus, I will have all of summer to soak up the heat and sunshine into my bones, savings for the bleak winter that will inevitably return next year.