I’ve been thinking lately about spring.

Remember spring? It was that balmy 10 days or so last March. I’m thinking spring on Vashon is like a Groundhog Day that goes on for months. Spring climbs out of its hole or wherever it is that it hides, looks around, shivers and dives back down again. Or maybe it heads for Mexico. I’m not sure anyone really knows.

As a consequence of being one of those fellows who’s always warm (my past partners typically have wanted to have me very close in winter and somewhere in the next county in summer), I have but one bulky and warm cable-knit sweater. It stayed sequestered in my closet all winter but was seldom off my person throughout the month of April and remains close at hand in May. This is nuts.

My mother called from New York recently to say it had snowed two feet upstate and then, the next day, the temperatures were in the low 90s.

“It’s climate change,” I told her. As a former environmental policy expert, I am knowledgeable about such things.

“Yeah, so you told me, big shot. But every day?”

Here on the left coast, of course, we don’t have such problems: It’s been January here for months.

And it’s no use listening to the weather reports. Art Tour weekend was supposed to be sunny. Uh-huh. Artists were burning canvases in their studios to keep warm.

In addition to spring, I’ve been thinking a lot about weathermen. No, not the ’70s radical group; I’m talking about the guys on television. And they’re always men, have you noticed? Otherwise they’d be the Weathergirls, who were two exceptionally large disco singers who recorded a fabulous dance tune called, “It’s Raining Men,” which was meant to be a fun song for girls but, naturally, became an anthem for gay guys. But I digress…

Weathermen. Can you imagine a better job? They can screw up every single day of the week, and get this: They still get to keep their jobs! How cool is that? I mean, imagine you’re an engineer at Boeing and you screw up, say, four days out of five. How long before your supervisor pays you a little visit and suggests a career change. To art, perhaps, where if you screw up nobody’s going to say anything because maybe that was what you intended to create in the first place and none of us is smart enough to tell the difference anyway because, well … it’s art.

And here’s another thing I’ve noticed about weathermen. When I was growing up, sitting on the floor in front of the gigantic mahogany console with the tiny glowing television screen, the weather guy — who was always middle-aged and balding, as if he’d been out in the elements too long — made do with pretty basic technological tools which, as I recall, amounted to fuzzy suns and clouds he slapped onto a magnetized board behind him while bantering good-naturedly with the host. Given their unrelenting failure at their jobs, I suppose being jovial kept them from jumping in front of a speeding train (that was back when speeding trains still existed).

Now, of course, we have satellites in space and sensors in the oceans and weather balloons in the sky with small children inside them … or not. And here’s the best part: Nothing has changed! Neither the weather guys nor the rest of us has the slightest idea what the weather is going to be. Heck, owing to the fact that they stand around in windowless television studios all the time, they don’t even know what the weather outside is right now!

But cold, wet and windy is a pretty safe bet for the foreseeable future.

— Will North is the program coordinator for this weekend’s ReadOn, WriteOn, VashOn Book Festival.