Whenever I heard the phrase “solar powered” I always thought of plants or those panels people put on their roofs. Once I started to think about it I realized that in a way I was also solar powered. I was a lot happier and energetic on a sunny days. This was especially true at the tail end of winter, when the snow is melting and the sweet scent of spring is in the air.
As a kid I played outside whenever I got the chance; in the summer I would be running around my neighborhood from dawn till dusk, and wouldn't have wanted it any other way. To this day my favorite seasons are spring and summer. Don't get me wrong I still enjoyed fall and winter, but jumping in leaf piles, and snowball fights while fun were no match for summertime adventures.
I'm from Michigan, where the winters are brutally long and the summers fly by like the blink of an eye. Winter isn't all bad, it has its own benefits: snowmen, snow-angels, snowballs, snowball fights, Christmas, etc. Then around the end of January and the beginning of February, the novelty wore off and I was freezing; not to mention, I still had school.
Towards the beginning of March I would always get excited because I knew winter was over and spring was around the corner; it got to the point that whenever the temperature rose above freezing I'd want to ride my bike everywhere I went. Suddenly I had energy again, as if someone had just thawed me out of the permafrost I'd been living in for the past couple months. My mood seemed to improve as well. The sunnier and clearer it was, the happier I was. Any day above forty degrees was a good day.
Freshman year of college my roommate, Mike experienced this first hand. I got out of class on a warm Friday afternoon, and when I got back to my room I ran up to Mike (who had been a cross country runner in high school) and said,
“Wanna go for a run?”
“Why do you want to go for a run? It's like forty outside.”
“Forty-four actually” Mike ended up staying home while I went for a couple laps around campus (I got to a smaller college, so campus isn't too big). As spring starts to steal the spotlight from winter, I can't help but lace up my tennis shoes and go play outside.
