Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991                   TAG: 9103100035
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

I'LL GO OUT ON A LIMB TO CELEBRATE

No class struggle here. You knew or you didn't.

The class barriers are toppled now, just as Karl Marx warned they would be, but not because the proletariat rose to behead the aristocratic tree lords.

Arbor Day is just impossible to pinpoint, whether you're a pinheaded rich guy or a pinheaded poor guy.

Arbor Day has become the opiate of the masses, rendering us a collective, slobbering mass of know-nothings.

For decades, Virginia's Arbor Day was the second Friday in March. It would have passed 48 hours ago. You would have paused reverently before a poplar, or genuflected beside a favorite sycamore and been done with it.

But in 1988, the gardeners to whom these things matter erupted. Enough had become enough. The mid-March weather was too fickle to gather around a gaping hole in Mama Earth and be reminded - yet again - of the tree's ability to provide shade, carbon dioxide, stable soil and all that stuff while the people ringing the root ball were being rained upon, sleeted at and snowed over.

And so state legislators alleviated the suffering of the rabble, officially transplanting the commonwealth's Arbor Day from mid-March to mid-April, when mud slides supplant sleet as the most pressing threat to outdoor ceremonies.

Virginia has ever since noted Arbor Day on the second Friday of April.

This year, that will be April 12.

Which you should not confuse with the national Arbor Day celebration, which will fall on April 26.

Which some people may confuse with Earth Day, which is April 22, but that being a Monday more likely to be observed on April 21, or April 20, or more than likely April 20 and 21.

Dan Henry, the Roanoke City forester, has it straight in his mind: "To a forester, every day is Arbor Day."

He isn't yet sure which day will be Arbor Day in Roanoke, but he knows it'll be after the 20th and before the 30th. Of April.

And Henry assures that there will be something going on once we figure out exactly when Arbor Day is.

Lou Southard of the Virginia Department of Forestry is candid, too.

"You've got to kind of use your imagination with Arbor Day. A lot of people work on Fridays. Lots of kids are in school. We have absolutely no preference," he says. "If you get a Christmas present on Dec. 26, do you give it back?"

No. But you may exchange it.

So don't fret that you missed Arbor Day on Friday. You didn't. Arbor Day will be held April 12, 20, 21, 22, or 26 this year, unless bad weather pushes it back to the 27 or 28, which could happen.

Any later than that, though, and you're flirting with May Day - a big day for workers in communist and socialist states. And Karl Marx has a lot to say about the working class.

We're not looking for a class struggle here.

Just Arbor Day. Which wasn't March 8.