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

DATE: SATURDAY, March 30, 1991                   TAG: 9103300012
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S SPRING, AND I HAVE RITES, TOO

We are not talking about one of those muscle-bound turtles that live in the sewer and make movies you have to take your children to or they, your children, will kill you.

Our turtle is biblical. It's not a singing turtle. It's a bird. A turtledove.

I get dangerously unbalanced when somebody mentions the voice of the turtle.

I went home recently in that condition.

"Well, my love and light to my feet," I said to the greatest station wagon driver of them all. "The voice of the turtle is heard in the land and soft zephyrs dance upon the meadow."

"Boy," the driver said. `'I hate it when this happens every year."

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I," I said.

"Get a life," the driver said.

She was working on new landscaping diagrams for our house and the houses of all three of our children.

When the driver works on such plans, she takes a cold detached look at nature and she gets impatient with temporarily insane English majors who feel they have to use at least some of what they learned in poetry classes.

"This is a time for wandering lonely as a cloud and running into hosts of daffodils," I said.

"You should run into the basement and get the lawn mower and do something about all those ugly tufts of grass," she said.

"Soon, the sweet showers of April will fall like soft and redeeming mercy on these clumps," I said. "That will be time enough to dance lightly and elf-like in the meadow and marvel anew at the greening of the tired old Earth."

"I guess I should smell your breath or something," the driver said.

"If smelling be your favor, smell on, my lady," I said. "But if I am besotted, it is not with strong drink. It is with the renewal of life and the bursting of the bud and nodding of the forsythia in a gentle, sister-like breeze."

"Maybe you'd like a little nap before dinner?" the driver asked.

"Perchance, perchance, my love," I said. "If so, my dreams will be of you and of a greensward dotted with clever colors of the wildflowers; of the fertile earth seeking again to bear forth her fruit."

Fortunately, the driver knows how to get me out of these dangerous emotional moods.

"Right," she said. "And daylight-saving time begins April 7 and you'll hit the Big 6-4 on the 24th."

"You know something?" I said. "I hate spring and I can't imagine why you waste your time with all those idiotic flowers."