Signs of Spring

It is spring.  I plan to try to control myself this year, to watch the progress of the season in a calm and orderly fashion.  In spring I am prone to wretched excess.  I abandon myself to flights and compulsions; I veer in various states of physical disarray.
          --Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I spent the weekend fascinated by the Weather Channel coverage of the blizzard in the Northeast (yeah, really) while I was enjoying a sunny weekend full of all the signs of spring around me here. 

There have been regular, short spurts of cold here with long warm stretches in between. Right now a drought-busting rain is settling in for the next few days. Half of my irises have already bloomed, the Carolina jessamine covering my porch is about to bust wide open with yellow blossoms, summer perennials are starting to push through in the flowerbeds, and even the blueberry bushes and figs are threatening to send their leaves open. What if some storm system rolling in from the west collides with an artic blast and dumps ice all over this new life? I felt a bit envious of those big fat snowflakes falling on Jim Cantore, but now that my heart is committed to the spring waiting to explode around me here I want the snow to stay far away.