Was spring fever a metabolic insistence on more? The woman remembered a few years back when a friend of hers had emerged unscathed from a serious automobile crash. Days after the first giggly gratitude had worn off this friend had become suddenly restless and searching. Within months she had produced her own life accidents, turning her job over, choosing marriage. Her survival had demanded some justification. She had felt forced to change the norm, pursue some new meaning.

In a smaller way, perhaps, people who merely survive another winter are stuck with the same need.

She thought about how many of us live—surrounding ourselves with security systems, battening down all the hatches against the Januarys and Februarys.

Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, when the snow alert is over and May arrives, security seems so limiting and stability feels like defeat rather than achievement. In the place of safely comes the urge to risk, to break patterns, to discover.

In one of his rambling lectures, Alan Watts once said that the most revolutionary question a person could ask is: "What do I want?" There is a feverishness in that question. It‘s a self-interrogation worthy of spring.

The people who merely assume that the question has a multiple-choice answer check off jogging or love affairs. They decide that their free-floating discontent is anchored to one of the secure decks of their lives and cut loose—from jobs, families, towns.

But the question always comes back, resisting any final examination. Spring fever, after all, germinates questions, not answers. It is a great, amorphous, rebellious why.

No, she supposed it wouldn‘t last long. Whether this is a disease or a moment of radiating health, it has a long incubation and short season.

Sooner or later, the elixirs of routines, the pleasant tonics of her life, would “cure” her. She knew that now, though she hadn‘t when she was younger. The gorgeous discontent was just spring fever and it, too, would pass. She said that with a sense of regret and also, yes, a sense of relief.