I walked out into the sunshine and immediately felt as though gravity’s tug was a trifle gentler than usual.

This was a psychological sensation rather than a physical one, to be sure.

Even I, who was never judged competent to earn my inevitable F in an actual physics course, recognized the illusion.

But illusions can be quite convincing, as anyone knows who has ever mistaken a mirage for a lake, or stood in a building that’s far out of plumb and watched a ball seem to roll uphill.

Weather can concoct some pretty confounding tricks, too.

The combination of Baker’s northerly latitude and elevation makes for winters both lengthier and more brutal than in places nearer both the sea and the equator.

And so, when winter at last begins to wane, the first day which can reasonably be described as spring-like arrives with a peculiar suddenness — as surprising, only pleasantly so, as barking your shin on a coffee table while stumbling around in the dark. Only on such a day can a modest temperature in the low 60s seem almost miraculously benign, the air as soothing against the skin as a luxuriously moist balm applied by a smooth hand.

Better still to be able to venture outdoors without the constrictive swaddling layers of wool and fleece and goose down with which you’ve been laden for so many weeks.

Here is the illusion, the sense that your limbs are lighter, more dexterous, as they slip easily through the air.

This reminds me inevitably of what it is like to heave a medicine ball several times and then pick up a basketball and take a few shots. The basketball, which weighs precisely as much it did before your workout, feels as though it were filled with helium rather than ordinary air, rich with comparatively corpulent nitrogen.

This sort of day is nothing if not unpredictable in our mountain valley.

Occasionally it barges in during the usually frigid February, convincing crocuses to show themselves only to be buried in snowdrifts soon after.

And once in a while we must wait, forlorn and freezing, until April is nearly finished before we are graced with the genuine article.

(I feel compelled to concede, considering what we’ve endured the past couple frequently wintry weeks, that that first springlike day is apt to be succeeded not by more of its kind but rather by its uncouth cousin, which comes bearing not gifts but snow squalls.)

Most often, though, this beloved milestone falls in March.

So it was this year.

On the afternoon of the 23rd I stepped outside for a stroll about town wearing shorts and a T-shirt, an outfit I hadn’t dared consider probably since Halloween.

The temperature was 64 when I started out. I checked later and learned that it reached 68 at the Baker City Airport, the warmest day since the previous Oct. 21.

As much as I relished the warmth of the sun, even the sheen of sweat on my forehead, I felt slightly guilty as I celebrated what was for me, and never mind the calendar, the first day of spring.

The purity of my appreciation was sullied by the drought.

I understood, as I ambled along the sidewalks and streets, that this dry and balmy day, as fine as it felt, was precisely the opposite of what is needed to vanquish the drought and its myriad problems.

Far better if rain were sluicing down in the valley and snow on the high ground, fattening the snowpack that keeps streams flowing and the valuable crops that green the valleys growing.

Concealed behind the mild breath of March was the crucible of August with its choking smoke of fires near and distant, its blood-ochre sunsets, its threat of destruction on the hot acrid afternoon gusts.

But even as I began to begrudge my own happiness at this gift of a comfortable day after such a prolonged period of chill, I came across a scene that quieted my unease.

A family was out for a walk, as I was. Tagging along at the back of this procession, with a man I took to be his dad, was a toddler. He was surely not yet two. He was wearing shorts, too, and I felt for him a certain kinship, a pair of lightly dressed pedestrians, one just beginning the greatest of journeys, the other almost certainly on the downhill side.

He bounced along with that gait that belongs solely to the very young — so endearingly clumsy, always seemingly on the verge of the sort of tumble that leads to skinned knees and tears and bandages festooned with cartoon characters.

The boy, oblivious to everything except his immediate circumstances — a trait we lose the knack for far too soon, it seems to me — was smiling and gesticulating as he made his way.

I suspect he appreciated this fine afternoon as I did. Except he wasn’t saddled with nagging concerns about droughts and depleted reservoirs and scorched forests.

I envied him in that brief moment our paths came together, envied the innocence of children as only those can who long ago succumbed to the sometimes grim realities of adulthood.