I’ve heard it a bazillion times: Oh, I love the fall season.

Not me, dear reader. My favorite season is about to arrive. The vernal equinox will occur in a little more than week and it will signal my favorite time of the year.

I noticed something quite welcoming Thursday while mowing my lawn: the Oklahoma redbud in our front yard is beginning to show its buds. Bring it, Okie tree!

I totally understand why many folks love the autumn in this part of the world. Our summers can get blistering on the Texas High Plains … although,  hey, it’s a dry heat. I also welcome the cooler temps that arrive about the time of the autumnal equinox.

The spring, though, presents an entirely different dynamic.

We turn quite barren around here in the winter months. Grass goes dormant, turning the fescue more brown than green. When you drive along the rural highways, you see even more of it; vast expanses of it, to be honest.

Rain? Sure, we get some. Snow? That, too. The cold, though, gets pretty damn bitter even without the precipitation.

My wife and I do appreciate the seasonal changes we get here. They are much more pronounced on the High Plains than where we used to live on the Texas Gulf Coast, in the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Texas.

We saw snow one day during our nearly 11 years in Beaumont; it was gone by noon that day, if memory serves. It wasn’t until after we left Beaumont for Amarillo more than two decades ago that our former city of residence got pounded by a serious winter storm of snow, ice and assorted weather-related miseries.

Here? That kind of winter pummeling is a much more regular occurrence. Which brings me to my point.

It is that our lengthy winters make me long for spring, the time for renewal. It signals an emergence from the cold, the dark.

I totally understand that Mama Nature doesn’t always respect the calendar, which tells me that spring arrives officially on March 20. We well could get another winter-type blast; that’s happened too over the years. Indeed, today the temperature is about 30 degrees cooler than it was Thursday.

The redbud in the front yard, though, tells me that spring is at hand.

I shall welcome its arrival with great glee.