One interesting upside of owning dogs is that I’m far more attuned to New York City weather than I was in my earlier, dogless life. Sure, a ten or fifteen degree swing makes some difference when you’re running from office to subway; but when you’re standing out in that weather for a solid hour, moseying slowly while two small canines consider where they’d most enjoy pooping, even a few points fahrenheit makes a huge difference. This morning, with temperatures unexpectedly back to the wintry 30s after a stretch of balmy spring 60s and 70s, I wished I’d brought along gloves and perhaps a hat.

But the arrival of spring is always a fraught time in NYC. After months encased in full-body cladding, we suddenly see pasty, puffy skin overexposed en masse. It’s a good time for gyms. While the rest of the country sees its peak gym attendance only at the start of the year, New York has a few other surges of gym attendance: one at the start of September, when everyone returns from the Hamptons with a sense of ‘back to school’ vigor, and another in late April / early May, when everyone realizes there’s perilously little time until they might need to show up in public in a bathing suit.

I’ve enjoyed watching restaurants, too, struggling each day to decide if they should open for dining outdoors, with chairs and tables appearing and disappearing. Granted, as a great New York Times piece observed a few years back, outdoor dining in NYC is still well short of the Continental ideal in even the best of circumstances: “nothing sauces roasted chicken like the exhaust from an M104 bus and there’s no music more relaxing than the eek-eek-eek of a delivery truck in reverse.”

So, with the weather swinging, we muddle through. Bundling up against intermittent cold, preparing to enjoy pending warmth. At some time in the next month, I’m sure the weather will hit its perfect, crisp spring ideal, holding there for a few weeks straight. It’s the time when I, and everyone else, thinks, “yes! this is why we live here!” Sure, after that brief interlude, the city becomes a humid, stinking, summer shithole, and we all fantasize about moving somewhere, anywhere else. But then, in the fall, we have another perfect, beautiful, crisp three weeks. Which carries us through the freezing, slushy winter to another year. Rinse and repeat.

All of which is to say, spring is (sort of) here. Let’s enjoy it while we can!