Spring has come and with it a familiar sadness. In the street below me, young women walk to yoga class—you can tell by their rolled-up mats—with arms that are bare for the first time in months. The thin limbs of the tree outside my window bristle with buds, tender pellets of renewal that would stir Van Gogh.
The wheel of life has turned full circle. But to some of us—those cursed with sensitivity—the change in temperature serves to remind that beneath the shifting finery of Mother Nature lurks a pair of foul-smelling undergarments that have been around, unchanged, nigh on several centuries. I refer to the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales.
