This Trickster Season - NYTimes.com The clock jumped ahead to spring on March 11. The calendar will jump ahead to spring in the early morning on Tuesday. And spring itself? Here in the Northeast, it has been wandering around, premature and a little lost, all winter long. One day it is snowing, and the next day the ski slopes are turning mangy, shedding like an old, neglected dog. One day the snowdrops pop up - a month too soon - and then it's the crocuses. People are already, hubristically, tilling their gardens, which, most years, would seem like a sure way of summoning a blizzard. Spring has never been a reliable season. Some years it includes too much summer, some years too much winter, and some years too much of both. But this year it feels as though the very idea of "season" has gone awry. Instead, the weather is doing impressions of itself. "Here is my late May," it seems to say, "and if you don't like that, let me show you my February 9th." To judge by the weather, the days of the year have been shuffled like a deck of cards. There's no knowing what will turn up. Some people manage to dress for the actual weather - you see them in shorts and flip-flops when it's 70 degrees in March. But many of us can't help dressing for what the weather should be, for a normal that isn't normal right now. But however we dress, humans can change and change again. Not so the sidewalk tulips and the hasty crocuses and the reddening maple buds. For them, there is no retrenching if the weather suddenly turns seasonably or unseasonably cold. The best they can do is hold on until spring is well and truly here, whenever that may be.