Spring in Durham

Stuck in a dusty corner of my dorm room, my fan has laid dormant since October. I've often looked at it longingly, eager for the day when I would need to spin the dial and feel the cool air.

And this week, finally, after a four-month-long gray Durham winter, after 15 inches of snow, I gladly turned my fan back on. As the blades started spinning, I heard them whisper, "Spring is here."

I know, spring doesn't officially start for a couple more weeks and most of the trees are still barren, but I still call this spring.

Forget the equinox. When I don't have to wear a jacket and when there are daffodils on my desk, it's spring enough for me.

This spring is especially sweet for me because it marks the beginning of the end of my time at Duke.

Knowing that my last two and a half months in Durham will be full of blue skies, flowering trees and sunny days is extraordinarily comforting. Although hectic, I expect the days until I don the cap and gown to be quite peaceful.

My class came into Duke with Hurricane Fran, so we could see the snowstorm as a bookend weather event, a parenthetical catastrophe that ushers us out the door. But I prefer to focus on this spring, to linger on the lush green lawns that we'll lie on as we turn into alumni.

Assuming any luck at all, we'll walk out of Wallace Wade Stadium on an absolutely perfect day. I'm hoping, in fact, that it will remind me of the day I visited Duke. I'm hoping that my senior spring and my graduation day will rekindle the emotions I had when I decided to head South for college.

There's really only one appropriate relationship between Saturday's weather and the game inside, and that's the color of the sky.

Wait, you might say, sky blue is Carolina's, that nasty shade of powder blue that adorns those ugly jerseys. But this fact holds true everywhere except in Durham.

At least according to me and the few people I've convinced of this, the sky color here is a deeper blue than any place else. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's like Durham wants to have a Duke blue sky, resisting the influence of the powder-blue patsies down the road.

I've lived in Durham with only short breaks since August 1997, and every time I leave the area, especially when I go back to my suburban New Jersey home, I miss the sky. I miss that dark blue and the contrast it creates with the red of East Campus and the gray of West.

But while I'm away, I'm comforted by the thought that I will return soon, that I'll be able to look up at that Duke blue and think of being a p-frosh and of every lovely spring day.

Once I graduate, however, that sense of imminent return will disappear. My unending spring break won't be requited by a return to the verdant campus.

Although there are plenty of things I dislike about Duke and plenty of reasons why I'll be glad not to live on campus, I'll miss spring in Durham.

The bright side of graduation is that I can determine exactly when I return. I can come back to campus in the midst of a spring, on a perfect day like the ones I will always associate with life in the real blue heaven.

Richard Rubin is a Trinity senior and managing editor of The Chronicle, at least for 35 more issues. He's not sure yet if it's a happy or sad countdown.