THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Monday, March 20, 1995                 TAG: 9503170129
SECTION: DAILY BREAK              PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: By MARK MOBLEY, Staff Writer 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   67 lines

ISN'T SHE LOVELY? SPRING IS IN THE AIR AND WE CELEBRATE IT WITH REESE'S EGGS, TENNYSON'S WORDS AND COLE PORTER'S SONGS

IF WE HADN'T TOLD you, would you have known?

Did you already discern that it's the first day of spring?

Did you wake up, look out the window and see the light striking at a different angle? Aren't you warmer than you were yesterday?

Isn't spring the season rich with possibility? Isn't it when, as Eva Gabor observed, plants shoot up out of the ground?

Cole Porter said he loved Paris every moment of the year, but didn't he give springtime top billing?

If you're a student, aren't you back from spring break already? Later in life, will you remember what it was like to get a crack at the summer before winter was over?

Does any student learn the full Tennyson sentence, ``In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove; In the Spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love''?

Turns to? Turns to? Did Tennyson befriend hibernating teens? Did the poet ever know a young man whose fancy turned away from thoughts of love?

But wait - isn't there an old Chinese proverb, ``Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men?'' Could Tennyson have had a point, that spring is when we are all most plant-like, seeking sun and heat?

Ever notice that only ``spring'' and ``fall'' are verbs as well as season names? (Unless . . . you're not rich, are you? Do you winter or summer elsewhere?)

Have you now or have you ever given into the totalitarian notion of spring cleaning? Do you plan to? Will you feel guilty if you don't?

Isn't Easter just around the corner, and isn't it fitting for one of the world's largest religions to celebrate Resurrection as the Earth brings forth greenery again? Aren't the pastel colors of the holiday just the hints of deeper hues to come?

Is there any finer candy than Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs?

Aren't spring months preserved in women's names - April, May, June? And Jane March?

Does anyone remember Edwin Way Teale, author of ``North with the Spring,'' who traveled from Florida to Maine in 1951, stopping in the Great Dismal Swamp? And did you know a swamp could haunt someone so: ``Under a cloudless, windless sky, its miles of shallow water lay tinted an ethereal blue, a strange and magical color we had never seen before. For years afterwards we would see it in moments of memory''?

And aren't such memories always tempered, perhaps by sudden wind: ``How many thousands of honeybees, floating and doomed, were strewn over the surface of the lake, we could only guess. It was an almost eerie sight, this final memory of Lake Drummond. In these wild and lonely surroundings, we had come upon the wreckage of a springtime disaster''?

But isn't death the exception to the rule in March, and even in famously cruel, set-you-up-just-to-knock-you-down April? Or at least doesn't it seem that way?

In ``The Seasons: Life and its Rhythms,'' Anthony Smith wrote, ``It scarcely needs underlining that spring is a good time in which to be born.''

It is. Because Spring is more about questions than answers, isn't it? ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY

Staff

by CNB