By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer

My beloved wife burrowed her cold nose closer into my back, and tried to crawl even further under the covers.

“Cold,” she grumbled. “Cold.” Despite being able to see my breath misting in the cool air of morning, despite the prospect of scraping frost from my windshield, despite the continued reassurance of long-handled underwear, I had to disagree with her.

It’s spring, darn it.

My jonquils have been up for weeks now, and the later varieties have begun to add their own shades of yellow, gold and white to the ranks of the first warriors of the warmth to come. I always call jonquils the soldiers of spring, since they are the first flowers to bloom, rearing their heads through the cold dirt and reaching for the sunlight.

Our early dogwood has long since bloomed, and survived winter’s last few forlorn hopes, those sneaky blasts of freezing air that sneak up on you like a bad dog stalks a mailman. The older, less flighty dogwood finally started budding a day or so before the calendar said spring starts, but that dogwood has the maturity of a grownup, and is willing to wait to have its fun.

My old friends the slider-turtles have crawled from their muddy burrows to line every available log and enjoy every ray of sunshine. I’ve already adjusted my beaver traps to avoid these friendly reptiles, although the water is still shockingly cold in most of the places I trap. Of course, the snapping turtles won’t be far behind the sliders, but by the time those old dinosaurs become very active, I’ll have turned beaver control over to their capable hands until after next fall’s deer season.

Speaking of deer, I haven’t seen an antlered buck in weeks, although I’ve found a shed fork or two whilst wandering through the waking woods. With the loss of antlers and the greening of the ground, last year’s rivalries have been cast aside in favor of the mutual need to feed.

The rabbits are dancing again – that’s the only way I know to describe the way they skip full into the air on moonlit nights in the center of a field. Cardinals, sparrows, orioles, mockingbirds, blue jays and even the lowly grackles have started competing with our poultry for the scratch feed we so negligently scatter about so the chickens, geese, and ducks will begin working for a living and eating bugs. Were our cats not so lazy, I’m sure there would be more piles of feathers and fewer spidery footprints in the driveway where the chickens scratch and the wildbirds reap the benefit of our profligacy.

I heard a squirrel chatter the other day, and looked up to see a young one busily gnawing a kernel of corn overlooked by my chickens. The little critter was warning his sibling to find his own breakfast. I was reminded of an older sister warning a younger brother “Don’t touch me!”

Spring isn’t just in nature, of course; one of my smoking companions remarked the other day how she had to get two boys to two different ball practices in two different towns within minutes of each other. She didn’t mind, though; she is also a lover of spring.

Another young woman I spotted the other night apparently had second thoughts about her own determination that spring had arrived. One of those cold, rolling, rumbling storms of March was roaring across the sky, and either in defiance or ignorance of the weather reports, she was wearing a simple little sundress, and not much else. Her companion was chivalrous enough to offer her his own jacket, but she just shook her head and clutched his arm closer as they ran from the oncoming rain.

While April showers get all the publicity, it’s March showers that I admire. They have an almost apocalyptic feel, all too often accompanied by severe winds or even tornados. The March 13 nor’easter of what, 15 years ago, brought several days of freezing cold, ice and even snow, but the week afterward was like a chorus of angels.

Miss Rhonda and I have once again started taking our evening meals and morning coffee on the greatest front porch in southeastern North Carolina, and more and more of the passersby who spy us there wave a short-sleeved arm out the window, rather than using winter’s greeting of a perfunctory honk of the horn.

Soon the tourists will return to the lake up the road from our house, and the grocery store, diner and gas station will fill with faces which disappeared just after the first of last October. Miss Dorothy will open the doors seven days a week again at the Driftwood, and Toni and her crew will quickly sell out of cookout supplies, camper repair parts, and sunblock.

So I don’t care if the calendar, at this writing, says it’s still winter.

My heart says it’s spring, darn it.