Every season has its hallmarks.

Crystal blue refractions bobbing in a swimming pool.  Sticky fingers holding a quickly fading popsicle. The short sleeves of summer morphing into three quarters and then full length. Waiting with anticipation to get your hands on the wishbone and challenging someone, anyone, to take the other end. The smell of burning wood emanating from neighborhood chimneys.  Getting out your big coat, scarf and woolen cap.

Birds sing and chirp year-round, I suppose. But in early spring, their songs seem particularly light and airy. And it haunts me. You raise your nose into the air allowing the sun’s warming rays to bathe your face while the cool breeze of winter’s goodbye brushes past your neck. This always gives me goosebumps. Not from the contrast of temperature, but from fear.

For me, spring ushers in the audit season.  For anyone in corporate America, the word “audit” sends chills down your spine. They come one after another in spring, like blows from a heavyweight boxer.  Late February, mid-April, early June. Was it a boxer’s fists or the world’s longest train running over me? Buh-bump, buh-bump, buh-bump.

Teams from headquarters descend upon me for a week at a time. Interviews, records, evidence, procedures. “Do you have them?” “Do you conform to chapter 6, section A, paragraph III?” Each question adds to the weight on my shoulders like stacking another planet atop Atlas. Are five hundred employees doing what they are supposed to? If not, all eyes are not on them, but instead, on me.

The harbingers of spring, pastel chalks scribbled on the sidewalk, blooming Azaleas, produce in me a psychosomatic response of fear and anxiety. Fight or flight? Or maybe just stand still and crumble under the weight of it all? While it has not yet come, I anticipate the proverbial cardboard box and removal of my nameplate at the conclusion of each audit.

A job with a big company has paid handsomely, but it has taken its pound of flesh. Spring, for me, is not what I think it was intended to be. Not the excitement and anticipation of a fresh start, growth, and creativity, but rather those crisp mornings foretell an approaching storm. Audit is coming.

As I near fifty years old and begin to quietly contemplate retirement, I wonder.  Twenty years from now, when I step out on my porch in my puffy, terry cloth robe on a crisp March morning, a cup of coffee in my hand, steam lazily billowing into the air, will I be able to be in the moment and appreciate spring for what it is and what it has to offer or will I simply respond as one of Pavlov’s dogs and shutter?