It's time to spring forth

"The winter's rains and ruins are over,

Frosts are slain and flowers begotten

Blossom by blossom, the spring begins."

-Algernon C. Swinburne

Though I'll always miss the lilacs, lady's slippers and shorter allergy

season of my native New England, there's no place I'd rather greet the first

day of spring than in the South. For, as author Henry Van Dyke observes,

"The first day of spring is not always the same as the first spring day."

With traces of snow still on the ground in the North, and the danger of

frost lingering in the air, you have to come lower in the hemisphere to

guarantee those two "first days" will arrive on the same date.

Besides the snow and the frost, I remember at least two other unmistakable

signs of a Northern spring: mud and floods.

Our dirt road was so muddy during those seasonal, snow-melting days that the

school bus could come no closer than a mile from our house. "Better you get

stuck in the mud than the bus," our folks said.

So with dry shoes in hand, and rubber boots on our feet, we children took

that daily walk in our mile-long - each way - stride. In the morning, when

our rubbers met the paved road, we put on our shoes and lined our muddy

boots across a kind lady's front porch. When the school day ended we removed

the poor lady's mud and rubber collage, reversed the footwear process and

took to the muddy road again.

After a particularly cold winter, however, we had more problems than just

mud. With ice easily three to four feet thick on the rivers, there never was

a slow, steady meltdown, like a tray of ice cubes warming in a picnic sun.

Instead, the ice broke into huge, jagged chunks, which then tried to follow

nature's course downstream.

But more often than not the miniature icebergs would ram together and

reassemble into a solid block of ice, creating a dam that sent the river

over its banks. Sometimes that out-of-bounds river water merged with the two

creeks near our house and bequeathed my brothers and me an extra week of

"spring break." And in those years our boots were no help at all.

But not all signs of a Northern spring were as treacherous or unpleasant as

mud and floods. I also remember tiny vegetable plants poking their leafy

heads from their tin-can pots on the windowsill; and new calves, lambs and

piglets making their noisy debut from the barn. After a long, dormant

winter, spring is the most alive season of the year no matter where you

live.

Spring is the only season when, all at the same time, the grass greens,

leaves emerge, plants sprout, flowers bloom, time "springs forward" and, in

the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, "A young man's fancy lightly turns to

thoughts of love."

Nor, it seems, is any other season used in so many descriptive ways: spring

chicken, spring break, spring cleaning, spring fever, springboard, spring

water and a host of other words associated with the image of life

"springing" again from the earth. The latter image, by the way, at least for

the English-speaking world, is how the season got its name.

Artists and composers capitalize on spring, too. From Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe

Through the Tulips," to Gilbert and Sullivan's "flowers that bloom in the

spring, tra la," and Oscar Hammerstein's love-struck, "Younger Than

Springtime," spring itself has a new life/new love "spring" in her step.

And who but the poet Robert Browning to put this coming-alive season into

words the populist, the classicist, the romantic and the just plain

tired-of-winter-folk can understand:

"The year's at the spring

And the day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hillside's dew-pearled.

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in his heaven -

All's right with the world."

(Barbara Seaborn is a local freelance writer. E-mail comments to seabara@aol. com.)