Spring in Texas — prettier than we deserve
I once knew a woman — not originally from here — who lived inside Loop 610 and thought the lands beyond Beltway 8 were 100 percent chupacabras and Confederate flags.
Whenever anyone said something in Texas was pretty, she’d ask: “Is it pretty, or is it pretty-for-Texas?” Nice. She later moved away to a place that I’m sure is just plain pretty, and not pretty-for-Arizona. Phoenix.
Just days ago, each of us came upon our first of the spring wildflowers, maybe a purple wine-cup or lavender phlox. And as March continues to unfold, each of us possessed of a soul will get in the car to go out and find the bluebonnets. Most head up U.S. 290 to Washington or Fayette counties; the more ambitious make a pilgrimage to the Hill Country.
Call it Bluebonnet Derangement Syndrome, the most benign form of crazy known to humans.
Introduce a camera or smartphone, and a formerly sane Texan will plunk a toddler or puppy or biker club in the middle of a blue-bonnet-and-potential-rattle-snake patch and not even think it’s weird, let alone dangerous.
Because spring in Texas is pretty, not pretty-for-Texas.
It’s kind of a strange thing. Whatever you may think of our winters, a climate for which one has to shrug on a coat a maximum of nine days a year is not one with a stressful winter.
Our cousins to the north own snow shovels, snow blowers, de-icers, snow tires, mittens, ice scrapers for their windshields, ice grippers for their boots. They probably keep kitty litter for traction in their car trunks. They work in offices redolent with the smell of sweat and wet wool steaming. They know the misery of stuffing toddlers into snowsuits.
For them, seeing the first green bit of crocus poke through the melting crust of snow is a fresh hope.
A Texan’s struggle is going out wearing an unstylish winter coat because replacing it makes no sense whatsoever.
In other words, between December and March, at least weather-wise, we have done nothing to deserve our spring.
But that’s how life goes. We don’t, thank heaven, always get what we deserve. Sometimes, of course, we get sorrow we didn’t earn.
But some things are just gifts from the universe that, like the Texas spring, we get unearned.
It’s called grace. Kyrie O’Connor is a former editor and reporter for the Houston Chronicle. HoustonChronicle.com/GrayMatters