The date is April 13th, the year doesn’t matter, it’s almost always the second week in April. The dreaded March is over; a cruel series of frigid and wet weeks in Pennsylvania, bleak enough to solidify anyone’s pessimism. Until this day: the first day of the year to hit 75 degrees, and suddenly a pessimist is turned optimist. On the surface, it’s simply sunlight; our section of earth has finally turned enough to feel warmth from the sun, but the sensation is something else. A college campus is one such place where that feeling is palpable to the point of tears. Everyone has collectively and simultaneously emerged from the months of seasonal depression. The sun to skin contact is too sweet to pass up and we’re quick to dress in as little as possible. Volleyball nets and hybrid sports games have popped up on the green, people walk as if they’ve just realized they have legs and laugh like they’re in a movie montage. It’s a sacred day, when we all feel the warmth we were sure would never return. No one ever talks about the way we forget in winter, forget what it’s like to wear short sleeves, to lay in the grass, to enjoy wind, to be optimistic. Even if we did talk about it, we would go on forgetting anyway, because nothing is as sweet as that first day above 70 degrees.
The following GIFs are documentation of that type of elation.
