You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring. Are there more beautiful words for these March days? In spite of the occasional gray, the nagging reminder that death is just down the street, green is the color that washes the landscape in seasonal covenant. Green whispers I’m here. Look closely into the brown pout, through winter’s brittle pain and ragged peskyness. There you will see me in buds and blooms-that-promise-to-be.

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes:

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. 

I admit that I have been a skeptic lately, holding my breath during these days of what I fear is false spring. Having lived in the Midwest my entire life, I have seen spring come quickly and dissolve just as quickly into more winter . Still, I have given myself to days in which there are truly no problems except where to be happiest. And fortunately for me, I have two little people who live 50 yards from me who are as good as spring itself. After a dozen under-doggies on the tree swing and a few walks around the pond to search for frogs, we can proudly proclaim that green is our color, we are spring people.

Spring is less a noun than a verb, a progressive verb, a becoming thing. In his poem, “Spring is your time is my time is our time,” poet e. e. cummings feels the emerging season:

(all the merry little birds are
flying in the floating in the
very spirits singing in
are winging in the blossoming)

Flying, floating, singing, winging, and blossoming. Spring is, indeed, a splendid becoming thing.

Ranier Maria Rilke writes that when spring arrives, The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart. I like this. The lilacs near my front door remember the lyrical words of Whitman and Shelley. The crocus recite their haiku, which unfurl themselves, image by image. And the red and gold finches sing the refrains of their ancestors with softer rhythms and sunny rhymes. When you know the poems by heart, each line spills into the breeze just as it has and just as it will for springs to come.

I admit that I am a sucker for the pasteled aisles of little girls’ Easter hats, M & Ms that sport pinks and yellows and powder blues, Chick Days at the local Tractor Supply Store, and the scent of warm rain. The sky is never as blue as it is in the early days of spring. Not quite cornflower or cobalt, it defies description. And this is quite alright with me, for I am also a sucker for things that defy description.

I can’t say it any better than A. A. Milne:

She turned to the sunlight
    And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
    “Winter is dead.”

from When We Were Very Young

So, take heart. Green is our color. Let’s shake our yellow heads, for we are spring, and winter is dead.