Mamacita says:  Yesterday WAS the first day of spring, you know, not to be confused with the first spring day, which, as Henry Van Dyke tells us, can differ by as great as a month.  The weather here in southern Indiana has been lovely: warm and sunny and breezy, and there are crocuses blooming all over town.

1. Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.  –Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

2. It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold:  when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.  –Charles Dickens

3.  Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.  –Ranier Maria Rilke

4.  It’s spring fever.  that is what the name of it is.  And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!  –Mark Twain

5.  Hoe while it is spring, and enjoy the best anticipations.  It is not much matter if things do not turn out well.  –Charles Dudley Warner

6.  Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.  –Doug Larson

7.  Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.  –W. Earl Hall

8.  If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would no be so welcome.  –Anne Bradstreet

9.  No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.  –Hal Borland

10.  Spring shows what God can do with a drab and dirty world.  –Virgil A. Kraft

11.  In June as manyh as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.  No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.  –Aldo Leopold

12.  In spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.  –Margaret Atwood

13.  Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.  –Ellis Peters

14.  Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men.  –Chinese Proverb

15.  In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.  –Mark Twain

16.  Spring has returned.  The Earth is like a child that knows poems.  –Rainer Maria Rilke

17.  If you’ve never been thrille3d to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.  –Audra Foveo

18.  The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day He created spring.  –Bern Williams

19.  If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.  –Nadine Stair

20.  The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow.  Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.  –E.B. White

21.  In springtime, love is carried on the breeze.  Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head.  –Emma Racine deFleur

22.  You can’t see Canada across Lake Erie, but you know it’s there.  It’s the same with spring.  You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland.  –Paul Fleischman

23.  The seasons are what a symphony ought to be:  four perfect movements in harmony with each other.  –Arthur Rubenstein

24.  An optimist is the human personification of spring.  –Susan J. Bissonette

25.  Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.  –Elizabeth Bowen

26.  A little Madness in the spring Is wholesome even for the King.  –Emily Dickinson

27.  I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.  –Langston Hughes

28.  Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.  –Victor Hugo

29.  If spring came but once a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change.  -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

30.  Spring:  an experience in immortality.  –Henry David Thoreau

31.  Spring is a heart full of hope and a shoe full of rain.  –Unknown

32.  Expect to have hope rekindled.  Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways.  The dry seasons in life do not last.  The spring rains will come again.  –Sarah Ban Breathnach

33.  For every person who has ever lived there as come, at last, a spring he will never see.  Glory then in the springs that are yours.  –Pam Brown

34.  I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility.  Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.  –Robert Browning

35.  Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.  –hare charles

36.  The cool wind blew in my face and all at once I felt as if I had shed dullness from myself.  Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center.  The birds were singing.  It was spring.  –Burl Ives

37.  I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees.  –Pablo Neruda

38.  Spring is God’s way of saying, “One more time!”  –Robert Orben

39.  Well, spring sprang.  We’ve had our state of grace and our little gift of sanctioned madness, courtesy of Mother nature.  Thanks, Gaia.  Much obliged.  I guess it’s time to get back to that daily routine of living we like to call normal.  –David Assael

40.  Listen, can you hear it?   Spring’s sweet cantata.  the strains of grass pushing through the snow.  The song of buds swelling on the vine.   The tender timpani of a baby robin’s heart.  Spring.  –Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

41.  March is a month of considerable frustration.  It is so near spring and yet across a great deal of the country the weather is still so violent and changeable that outdoor activity in our yards seems light years away.  — Thalassa Cruso

42.  Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. –Unknown

43. The last fling of winter is over … The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it. It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
— Donald Culross Peattie

44. I have said that there was great pleasure in watching the ways in which different plants come through the ground, and February and March are the months in which that can best be seen. –Henry N. Ellacombe

45. Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime. –Martin Luther

46. Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. –Gustave Flaubert

47. To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon. –Kurt Vonnegut

48. How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! –Emily Dickinson

49. Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance. –Yoko Ono

50. Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy’d the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done… –Matthew Arnold

I am hoping the old quotation, “When March comes in like a lamb, it goes out like a lion” isn’t true. It also bothers me greatly that the seasons aren’t capitalized. By my way of thinking, the seasons are important enough and individual enough to merit capital letters. I like to capitalize them when I use them myself, but I have to tell my students not to, because the rule is in their book. Then, after that particular lesson is over, I tell them to go ahead and use capital letters for Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter if they darn well want to. “Just remember to use lower case when you fill out your final exam.” I do not feel the least bit guilty about this, either. I like the seasons. When I think about them, they’re personified enough to have proper names.

Some day, I hope to be brave enough to tell my students to take a gel pen and cross out that silly rule. How sad, isn’t it, that something like that is on my “Bravery List.”