We have seasons, real seasons, in Pittsburgh, four of them and generally in the right order. It’s not like up north where they only have the fourth of July and Winter, or out in California, where in the end up having nothing really, only rain or sun, enlivened by the occasional earthquake.. There’s still steel in the air here, a taste of the mill in the sulfurous blast of August, rusting October, and even the arc weld of lightning during a mid-June squall.

Things change gradually but dramatically, the whole back drop to the play, the sound effects even, as the drone of the cicadas gives way to the squeak of the school swings. Pittsburgh knows that nothing lasts, can witness the giant oak turning goddess green, then golden, only to be soon enough reduced to bare bones. How can people who live in a pacific climate understand that? In the land of the lotus eater the lack of a winter reckoning makes the grasshopper emperor over the ant.

The hard part about winter in Pittsburgh isn’t the cold (though it gets cold enough, believe me), it’s the snow. I snows as much there as in many famously snowy places, but it doesn’t accumulate as much, not much comfort when you’re trying to climb Negley Hill with a foot of snow on the ground and another foot coming down. Weather’s a little different on a "hill" like that than on some fruited plain.

But there’s a comfort in the inevitability of it, isn’t there? That no matter how harsh this season in hell, things are going to change, that spring will come up and do her turn too. Places where the year is too weighted in the direction of cold and night, like Wisconsin say, tend to produce tight-asses and apocalyptics, alpha ants bent on eradicating all grasshoppers. There’s a season for everybody in Pittsburgh, and most people eventually have theirs.

Only sometimes, on a blustery spring afternoon that feels like autumn, you can get a little confused and forget which way you’re heading…