I am thunderstruck by spring.  I mean, there's that whole adoration of my husband that happens this time of year.  He has been humping anything on my body (and I want him to) like he's a sex-starved single male baboon at the zoo lobbing feces at the tourists in boredom and suddenly, the zookeeper brings him a ravishing she-baboon with a pink bow on her head.  It's freaking spring!

Our love-life aside, spring in Tennessee is just like a post card.  There are all of these homes that scream neglect and sharecropper tossed between mansions of some country music mogol or some master of old that seem ill-placed interspersed between vegetation and dilapidation. Blooming dogwood looks wonderful in any yard with its big, creamy, floppy flowers floating in the air like the peace one finds in a Japanese tea garden. Forsythia in bushes everywhere, sculpted and not.  Magnolias bloom like Georgia O'Keefe paintings, flowers like huge biblical revelations of life after death.

I find myself eyeing over thickets hugging fences and looking for the sign of blackberry blossoms and poison ivy.  I'm finding places to put strawberries as groundcover in my front bed amongst the bulbs -- daffodils, crocus, hyacinths and the occasional wild onion.  Every newly mowed lawn smells like a slice of freshly sliced vidalia onion and I find myself leaving the windows open to inhale it.

The true revelation of the South is the azalea bush.  I saw some with buds with the petal colors starting to show through the edge of the outer green.  Pinks, reds, oranges and whites like cotton candy at a carnival will explode here for weeks and then just as suddenly, fall silent and die out.  While it continues, it's as if to give a distraction from that awkward stage where the trees are starting to leaf, but the forests aren't yet completely green and dark with decidiuousness.

In a month, it will be lilies everywhere, wild in ditches and in carefully constructed yards with mulch and bricks. Someone somewhere will be selling them from their house and their yard will have a fence that does not require posts because there are lilies to support it.

I find myself watching people's porches for chairs that look like they will be used and thinking about what I will do with Genny this summer, how many of my chairs will be used, if Mike will ever fill the umbrella stand with the sand I finally convinced him to buy, swimsuits and flipflops.

Spring is that harbinger of summer, much as this winter seemed to go on like the nightmare you can't wake up out of for a while until you are good and terrified.

We covered up a few plants, as we are trying to get the garden in, but Mother Nature keeps stamping her feet and keeping Old Man Winter around for her pleasures before she laces the flowers of spring into the hair of summer.