Yes, in the sense that the balance sheet is not reset every year. I remember a year when a cold snap killed the blossoms on my flowering trees — it rained and froze, and they fell to the earth. Instead of five days of transitory beauty, I got three, and I was furious.

I shook my fist at the heavens to curse Mother Earth — which is ridiculous, but you look noble when you do that, and silly when you appear to be arguing with the ground, where Mother Earth would be. “You owe us for that! You owe us!”

But of course there is no Mother Earth, standing in a forest, ready to smite us for mistaking margarine for butter. Good thing, too, or we’d always be wondering if she was mad at us. Warm weather in February? She’s irked. Setting us up. She’s going to blast us with a foot of snow in May because we said we’d compost and we didn’t.

If she was real, we’d be bothering her all the time with supplications. The ancient Romans believed that Jove, also known as Jupiter, was the god in charge of the weather, so you’d keep him happy with sacrifices. I imagine a Roman couple heading out on a weekend vacation, and the wife asks the husband if he sacrificed a lamb to ensure good weather. He nods, yes, yes, of course.

“Well, I hope it was a nice lamb, all plump and clean, not one of those stringy things with spindly legs and cloudy eyes.”

“I’m sure it was a fine lamb,” he says, regretting it right away.

“What do you mean? You didn’t pay someone to do it, did you? They’re thieves! They pocket the sesterces and sell the lamb to the butcher! If it rains because you couldn’t be bothered to sacrifice a lamb I swear ...” (Rain starts to fall.) “Oh, fine. Oh, FINE. Now Jove, master of the heavens, king of all gods, has it out for us.”

“I’m sure he’s busy with other things.”

“And I’m sure he has staff, and they get a note that says, ‘Quintus Septillus went cheap on the lamb.’ They know what to do.”

“So I’m the bad guy for handing off the job to someone else, but Jove’s OK in your book if he has Mercury or Janus arrange for a light sprinkle?”

(A mile in silence.)

“The Metulli were going down to Herculanium, and he sacrificed to both Jove and Jupiter.”

“They’re the same god!”

“Well, it can’t hurt!”

Couples would be having those conversations today if the old gods still reigned, except they’d be booking the sacrifices on an app. Which would nag you to sign up for recurring sacrifices to ensure smooth, timely delivery of every season.

To return to the original question, and dig myself out of this digression, yes, spring will still be just as sweet. We forget about the rigors and deprivations of winter as soon as spring is secured, and we settle into the precious interval of green as the natural order of the world. Every year we carry on as if winter never happened.

So it won’t be different this year, when it actually never did.

james.lileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 • Twitter: @Lileks • facebook.com/james.lileks