Forget the groundhog...I believe in the Tulips!

Groundhog day has always been an interesting "holiday" for me. I call it a "holiday" simply because that is what it is supposed to be. The groundhog sees his shadow every year and, therefore, there are always six more weeks of winter. Did anyone else ever figure out that there are just six more weeks of winter and it has nothing at all to do with a groundhog?

Having lived in Utah almost my entire life, six more weeks of winter often sounded like a death sentence. Since it sometimes snows in August, often snows in September and always snows before Halloween, February 2 is a cruel day to even pretend that spring may come early. In Utah, the close of January opens the sixth month of winter and the people there officially begin to look like cave creatures who don't know what it's like to breathe fresh air (unless the people in question are skiers, then they have really weird sunburns on only their lower cheeks, nose, and under their chin).

I lived in Logan, Utah for seven years and it was very common for snow to still be coming out of the sky in May (like on the morning of Paul's doctoral graduation, when we woke up to find a good layer of snow on the ground at my sister's house). I am pretty sure after years of attending school there that the summer just didn't like college students. The second they all flooded in at the end of August until most of them cleared out in May, summer ran away to hide. Too bad the few months between consisted of temperatures over 100 degrees. I think neither spring nor fall exist in Logan.
We lived on the coast of California for a year and I wore short sleeves through the entire "winter" there. The two days it actually frosted, people would dump hot water on their windshields to defrost them. I freaked out when I heard about this abomination. There is no way a person could ever do that in Utah if they had any desire to keep their windshield in one piece. Everyone in California claimed they were "freezing" and I frequently pointed out that a person can not freeze unless the temperature is actually below freezing (and had to inform them that the freezing point is not 45 degrees).

Today I live in Idaho, which I previously believed to have similar weather to Utah, but the area we live in does not. The most common winter weather here includes an afternoon snowfall of an inch or two, which somehow turns into rain when the sun goes down and is gone by morning. It baffles me that the snowfall that started the afternoon before is rain in the morning. Isn't the sun supposed to be warm and, therefore, the temperature drops when it goes away at night?!? I thought I had this concept figured out, but I guess I will work on it some more.

Groundhog day came around and I looked out the window to decide whether this famous groundhog would see his shadow at our house or not. Of course, it was a beautiful day and the sun was shining. I was pretty sure the groundhog would have seen his shadow had he lived in our back yard. As I looked out the window, I thought I could see something in the dirt that had not been there before. On further inspection I discovered that not only would the groundhog have seen his shadow, but the tulips would have seen theirs as well.
I was excited that my bulbs had actually survived their spring transplant last year (which is naughty, you are supposed to transplant them in the fall, but how are you supposed to know what color they are in the fall?) and am now hoping that they continue to live since some of my other transplanted plants were doing weird things like blooming in the fall when they are spring bloomers and coming up in the fall when they are supposed to be spring bulbs. I think my bulbs are really excited about February because these bulbs grew up in Utah (thanks, Mom!!). Either they are like me and do not understand that it can be warm in January or they are counting their months from the date of transplant--eight and a half months from transplant is the same as the eight or nine months of winter they experienced every year in their previous home.

Groundhog day has taught me three things: (1) that winter is not really over until at least most of March has passed, (2) that February 2 is always a beautiful day in every location on the planet, and (3) I am going to crush this previous knowledge and from this moment on judge whether spring is coming by my plants (especially my tulips) rather than some random animal in Pennsylvania.

Hello tulips and welcome spring!!