Soft spot for spring

Damn the calendar, yesterday was the first day of spring in Boston. What yesterday did was talk us back from the ledge.

I know this was because I watched a Little League game in Olmsted Park. I was entranced by a kid in left field who did what every Little League left fielder has done since the beginning of time: pick his nose, oblivious to events unfolding elsewhere in the field. That's when I knew it was spring.

It was spring because the diamonds and soccer fields from Franklin Park to Moakley Field were blurs of color and motion. Parents chatted with one another and coaches with an ease that will leave them soon. It won't be long before they will become deranged adults, veins throbbing in their foreheads, screaming maniacally at anything that moves.

There's a name for this. Summer.

It was spring yesterday because a woman lay on her back on the grass near Jamaica Pond, legs crossed languidly, reading a paperback held in one hand up against the sun. Runners and walkers passed by in legions, the rictus that normally disfigures their faces replaced by what looked suspiciously like serenity.

The Observer has always favored fall above all seasons for all the right reasons. It is the most beautiful and the most profound time of the year, particularly in these parts. But yesterday reminded me that spring here is, quite simply, a medical imperative. You let what I call Kafka season go on long enough, and you're in a locked ward wearing the paper slippers.

Yesterday was the day we emerged from our winter carapace. I watched men and woman rejoin the human race like miners exiting a mineshaft, stunned by the shock of sunlight after a long shift below ground. I saw folks on the Esplanade remove more pieces of clothing than is altogether proper to embrace the healing powers of the sun. Melanoma -- isn't that the word for eggplant in Italian?

These people reminded me of the Russians we would see in Life photos during the Cold War: fat, fishbelly white, and happy as porpoises in the warmth of Odessa or Havana. And why not? After a ghastly spring like this one has been, sun trumps pride. Unleavened bleakness will do that to you.

When the temperature blows through the 70-degree mark like Corey Dillon coming through the line of scrimmage, you know it's spring. When the Yankees are in town, you know it's spring. When the home team beats said Yankees, you know it's a good spring. When the home team takes five runs off Rivera, you know it's heaven.

It was spring yesterday because each sex admired the other without fear of going up on charges. There was the woman who looks like a million bucks walking up Newbury, the zephyrs blowing the winter out of her soul. There were the shoulders on the hardbody with a two-day growth jogging past. Women took notice. Good for them. Once again, everything is possible.

It was spring in Boston yesterday because I saw how dirty the place is. Sunlight can't remove the filth; it showcases it. The detritus of a winter litters our sidewalks and parks, unspeakable stuff that will remain there until we get rid of it.

It was spring because it was soft. You can't fake the softness of spring. False spring days try and fail to replicate it. Those villainous, turncoat days seduce us with their thin, watery light -- we'll settle for anything in March -- before destroying us in sleet and punishing rains.

The shock of spring includes the context it brings us. We forget there is another way to live besides the mean, mole-like posture we are forced to assume pretty much from Thanksgiving into April. We miss how sad our lives are during this period unless we leave and return.

A couple of week ago, the Observer spent a blissful week in Arizona. What I found there were blue skies and 80 degrees. Every day. I had to wear a sun hat to protect my balding pate. Life, quite simply, looks different in those conditions.

Your expectations change in that kind of weather, as they began to do here yesterday. They rise and stay risen. You expect things to go well and more often than not, they do. Your worst instincts abate for awhile.

I returned home to find faces that had gone from sad to scary. Bostonians were in dire straits. Friends, colleagues, strangers -- they had the wall-eyed look of a spooked horse that made me want to cross the street. It's not just that these people were down. They were dangerously down.

All winter, as my mental stability descended to that of Raskolnikov, I chatted with my cousin, who winters in Tucson. I love him dearly, and it was he who was kind enough to lend me his place there. But there was always a lightness in his voice that dismantled me, trapped in the bitterness of a Boston winter. Call it winter pity. We Bostonians wallow in winter pity.

And yet, finally, we have lurched to spring. The rain, when it comes, will be warm. The clouds, when they float in, will be friendly. After a mere week in Tucson, the scales fell from the eyes of the Observer. Sometimes, it really is all about the weather.

Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com.