Spring Sprung Upon Us

Did you have this discussion in your household? Is today the first day of spring or tomorrow? Our calendars were conflicted on the arrival of the vernal equinox. Natalie Angier, NY Times:

But as I soon discovered in my attempt to resolve the calendar crisis, the vernal equinox in 2007 has the added snag of arriving at the querulous hour of just seven minutes past midnight, universal time, on March 21. Coordinated Universal Time is what used to be called Greenwich Mean Time, but the new name doesn’t make it any more universal than it ever was, and it remains a time zone centered in Britain. For those of us in the United States, the vernal equinox arrives while it is still the evening of March 20.

Whatever the date, go on and celebrate, for the vernal equinox is a momentous poem among moments, overspilling its borders like the swelling of sunlight it heralds. As with everything else about the seasons, the equinox is the result of Earth’s sizable tilt, 23.5 degrees relative to the plane of the orbit. That tilt is fairly fixed, and as Earth makes its way on its circumsolar migration and rotates on its imaginary skewer, the northern tip of the skewer always points toward the same spot in space, the bold sparkle of Polaris, the North Star.

Coordinated Universal Time? Apparently even Greenwich Mean Time has gone PC. I guess it sounded too definitive.

It's not a big deal, but sometimes our family likes to bang a few pots and pans outside in celebration of the day. So here's some music to herald spring (yeah, the French guy does stop talking). Carmina Burana. And here's another version. Happy Spring!