Hentrietta Hay's Column

In "The Rite of Spring" Stravinsky put to music one of the many pagan ceremonies that humankind has used through the years to explain the changing seasons. In Fantasia Disney used the title and the music to depict in animation the creation of the world, complete with dinosaurs. The Rite of Spring is a very graphic phrase that expresses all the newness of the season. And despite the weather, or perhaps because of it, spring is here.

The standard definition of spring, I suppose, is that it is the season when the sap rises in trees and kids and there is not a thing in the world you can do about either one. There are, however, other harbingers of the season. The crocuses and the gardeners come out, and belated snowstorms bury everything in sight.

Spring is my birthday. Every year of my childhood in Englewood it snowed on that day in late April. It was a family tradition. It was not a question of whether, but of how much. Even the year that I got my roller skates I had to mush home from school and try to go wheeling down south Acoma in six inches of snow. It was hard, but it was spring.

My favorite spring myth is the Greek story of Persephone. She was the beautiful daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. She 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 accepted the gods' proposal that Persephone should spend at least part of the year with her.

And so, according to one translation, 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.

Here in the Grand Valley we know when spring is here. It is when the neck of the swan on the Grand Mesa is broken. Only then is winter truly over. I wonder what the Greeks would have done with that one.

Musicians and poets and artists have always used the theme of spring. One of the favorite poems of my childhood sings of it. William Wordsworth wrote, ". . . When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze . . . Ten thousand I saw at a glance. Tossing their heads in sprightly dance."

Gilbert and Sullivan wrote of "Flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la," but they had nothing to do with the case.

Some of the most beautiful flowers in the world come, not from the ground, but from the passionate mind and hand of Georgia O'Keefe. It is always springtime where her paintings are.

But not all the paeans to spring are joyful. Ogden Nash says, "I do not like the signs of Spring, The fever and the chills, The icy mud and puny bud, The frozen daffodils...Let other poets gaily sing: I do not like the signs of Spring." Oh well, there's always one in every crowd.

As you have by now discovered, the sap has risen in me too. I am suffering from the vagaries of spring, and will doubtless recover. But a word of wisdom to any newcomers to the Grand Valley. Although spring is officially here, do not put away your snow shovels.