Henrietta Hay's Column

By the time this appears in print the sun will probably be shining brightly and the temperature hovering somewhere between 40 and 80. But today is the first full official day of spring and the snow is falling and so is the temperature. The ground is white and the flakes are those huge soft ones that you want to go out and chase.

Spring in Colorado tends to be fairly short - like forty-eight hours or so - and then it goes back to winter. But one day there is that certain smell in the air that says, "Hey, hang in there: spring is coming - but we don't know when." And we really don't. Somewhere between late February and June we go suddenly from what might be called variable chilly to SOLID HOT. During that period of indecision we have sunshine and rain, snow and wind, warm and cold, and even occasionally a spot of hail and lightning. For those months you wake up every morning not knowing what the season will be today and you never know what kind of weather to dress for. And then suddenly it is summer.

Ogden Nash had a comment about this day:

Listen buds, its March twenty-first;

Don't you know enough to burst?

Come on, birds, unlock your throats!

Come on, gardeners, shed your coats!

...And come on, lambs, in frisking flocks!

Salute the vernal equinox."

I haven't checked out the lambs, but the buds and the birds and the gardeners are all about to burst. Spring is here, in spite of what is going on outside my window today or perhaps because of it. I know because my three crocuses are up, the robins are fat, and a couple of my neighbors were sunbathing this week while I was wearing a ski jacket. Another neighbor was polishing his golf clubs with tender loving care, the people who went south with the birds for the winter are trickling back and I walked the Audubon Trail.

My crocuses are a strictly accidental harbinger of spring. One year three crocus bulbs somehow got dropped into my barren little gravel patch. And with all the talented gardeners around, guess who has the first flowers of the spring. Sticking up out of the gravel and often out of the snow, long before anybody else's bulbs have even stirred, are my three beautiful little white and lavender crocuses. Spring is here.

The chief sign of coming spring is the stirring of the gardeners. While the temperature was zero and the lawn was covered with a foot of snow I could hear the seed catalogs rustling in the neighborhood. Long before the snow was gone they were peering down into the brown detritus of last year's garden looking for signs of new life.

I moved into a condo partially because I was tired of mowing the lawn and taking care of the garden. I assumed that others living here had similar motives. Little did I know that I would be surrounded by skillful, experienced gardeners to whom every patch of dirt is a direct challenge? Perhaps they too had thought their gardening days were over, but spring awakens the veteran gardener just as it awakens the bulbs. In any case, they have created beauty all around me and I feel like a failure - except for the crocuses. Somehow in me the gardening urge lies dormant even in the spring.

It turns out that the dates of spring are simply a matter of custom, anyway. No formal governmental body ever declared that spring begins with the equinox and summer with the solstice. According to one climate researcher, "Although the sun-earth geometry is clearly the origin of the seasons on earth, it has nothing directly to do with temperature or weather." We knew that all the time! In England spring runs from February through April. In ancient Greece it began when Persephone emerged from her winter stay in Hades.

In Colorado, spring is when we feel it and smell it, and I have smelled it this year. So let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. I know spring will be back or, as the kids say,

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz,

I wonder where the flowers is.