It's Spring!

"Listen buds, it's 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."

So said Ogden Nash one spring day, probably on the east coast somewhere. Of course, Nash didn't understand that in Colorado that first balmy, spring-like day comes in the middle of winter and fools everyone. "Colorado spring" is an oxymoron. Today it is spring. Next week it will probably be winter -- or maybe summer. But who cares? The spirit of renewal starts to bubble in us that first day of perfect weather, whenever it comes.

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.

Spring is more of an emotion than a season. It brings out all kinds of music and legend and poetry, to say nothing of hormones. My favorite spring myth is the Greek story of Persephone, the beautiful daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. Persephone was abducted by Hades and carried away into the depths of the earth. Demeter vowed to allow no harvest until she should see her daughter again. She finally made a deal with the gods to allow Persephone to spend at least part of the year with her, sort of an early version of shared custody.

And so Persephone spends the winter months below the ground, but when she comes back to her mother in the Spring, the earth "will burst into bloom with flocks of sweet-smelling flowers and the fruit will grow on the trees."

Some of the most beautiful flowers in the world come, not from the ground, but from the passionate mind and hand of painter Georgia O'Keefe.

In "The Rite of Spring" Stravinsky put to beautiful music one of the many pagan ceremonies that humankind has used through the years to explain the changing seasons.

Regardless of the weather, my personal harbinger of spring is a little clump of purple and white crocuses which emerge from a patch of gravel in my back yard late in February each year. I will never know how they got there or how they survive, or how they know when to stick their necks out, but they are the first blooms every year.

Spring is the season when you convince yourself that you have a slightly better chance of getting across the mountains without being held up by a snowstorm than you had in January. It's the season when you laugh at pictures in the paper of flatlanders heading for spring skiing and struggling in the snow with tire chains -- dressed in shorts.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world record snowfall for a 24 hour period was 76 inches at Silver Lake, Colorado on April 14 and 15, 1921. That might have been the year I got roller skates for my birthday and couldn't find the sidewalk in Englewood for a week.

But spring is definitely coming. The horseshoe pitchers are pitching, the golfers are golfing, the kite fliers are flying and the field crew at Beer Field is getting ready for the Rockies' opening day.

Here in the Grand Valley the natives believe that spring is here when the neck of the swan on the Grand Mesa is broken. I wonder what the Greeks would have done with that one. Of course, you have to be able to find the swan before you can know the state of its neck.

So --

"Listen buds, it's March twenty-first

Don't you know enough to burst?"

Meanwhile, don't put your winter coat in mothballs yet.