Wichita Doesn't Really Have a Spring, Just Two Weeks Between Winter and Tornado Season

People who’ve never lived here tend to picture Kansas as flat and calm, and half of that’s true. It is extremely flat. It is not calm. Winter runs long and mean out on the ramp, wind coming across open ground with nothing to slow it down, and by the time it finally lets go there’s maybe two real weeks before the sirens start up again on the other end of the seasonal calendar. Everyone I work with has an app for it, a radar loop pulled up on their phone during the slow parts of a shift, watching a green smear turn yellow turn red over some county forty miles off, trying to guess whether it’s headed anywhere near us.

I’ve noticed my reading pace tracks this calendar almost exactly, and it took me a few years of doing the math on it before I actually saw the pattern. Winter reading is slow and deliberate, cold mornings before a shift, a book I can sit with for twenty unhurried minutes because there’s nowhere else I need to be yet. Storm season reading is the opposite, fast and interrupted, a chapter grabbed in fifteen-minute windows because half my attention’s on whether the sky’s doing something I need to pay attention to. I got through Cloud Atlas almost entirely during one particularly rough storm stretch, six interlocking stories read in fragments between watch updates, which in hindsight might be the single best possible way to have experienced a book built entirely out of interruptions.

The two-week gap in between, the actual spring, if you want to call it that, is when I get almost nothing read at all, because it’s also exactly when Deacon’s outdoor grill comes out and half the Thursday table decides we should be sitting outside instead of in the garage. No, I’m not complaining, exactly, about that trade. But it does mean my whole year has this lopsided shape to it, long stretches of careful reading bookended by a short violent season and a shorter mild one that somehow eats just as much of my free time as the violent one does.

Renata grew up somewhere with actual seasons, four distinct ones, evenly spaced, and she still finds it a little funny how much weight I put on this two-week window every year, like it’s a holiday instead of just a gap between two much longer things. Maybe it is a kind of holiday. It’s the only stretch where I’m neither bracing for cold nor watching a radar app, and I notice every single spring how much lighter that makes everything feel, reading included, right up until the first watch of the year gets issued and the whole cycle starts again.