The snow is melting, the icicles are making pleasant dripping sounds as they plop onto the front porch and echo across the hardwood floors inside. The birds are back chirping at their feeders, and people are thinking, this is the year I'm going to plant a yucca tree in the garden.

The winter gets long in the suburbs of Cincinnati. People go to museums and movies and functions at churches and schools. They watch Dancing With the Stars, and hope to see someone trip that atheist magician. People long to go outside, get something from the shed. Have a picnic. People become Russian existentialists in the winter, sword-fighting the despair with absinthe spoons. 

In the spring, and in an election season to boot, things come alive. Your neighbors--the pasty looking people you now see gingerly and squinting emerging from their long winter naps--are happy to see you. They will wave their arms at you, and you will wave your arms too. You learned how to greet people this way when you were very small.

Soon, the people will be out, buzzing their grasses in unison, getting any strays or hard to reach clumps with the weed-whacker. It's an election season, so the yards will be dotted with John McCain signs, and an occasional sign requesting that you Vote No on Issue 10, Vote No on Higher Taxes. Issue ten of course being the school levy.

Pretty soon, it will be time for iced-tea and Frisbee golf. People will be taking walks around the neighborhood, examining the season's landscaping. Little kids will be riding their bikes and getting scraped kneecaps, and there will be lots of fishing.

In the suburbs, we know that if the angels of the apocalypse choose the first day of spring to blow their horns, we can drown out the noise with the sound of our lawnmowers.