Spring settles today with its rejuvenating equanimity on the just and unjust, the powerful and powerless, the rich and poor, the young and old, the path and the promenade.

Of all the seasons, it is the most outwardly, lustrously, lustily obvious in its arrival, but somehow still subtly disguised in the emerging minutiae of a thousand patterns and memories.

When does spring happen? Is it the moment you take a broom to brush away the grit from the front steps? Is it when the bicycle tires are pumped with air? When you can read out on the porch? When a fingertip-sized bud of green emerges from a place it has no business being? When the windows are clean? When your bare knees show? Is that a welcome, an invitation, an acknowledgment?

We grow old and impatient waiting for this inevitable season, then are reborn and surprised with its entrance. An escort of snow would be fitting reward for that impatience.

1 day to go: Spring greening

It's easy being green. Outdoors the greens are darker, but indoors space has been made on water-marked window sills facing south for seed-starters and skinny little light-green seedlings. Dirt in an egg carton works pretty well. If you can't grow a tomato and buttercup lettuce from seeds here in March, maybe you really should move to Arizona. We don't mind waiting for spring so long as we know it's only four months until we get BLTs for breakfast, dinner and supper. Go crazy this spring, get the striped petunias. There will be a spring, so long as there are tomatoes.

2 days to go: Spring gleaning

You're not donating. You're re-gifting. You have been spring gleaning and here are the results, as delivered to the nearest charity: books about losing weight (while you sleep), and gaining muscle, understanding (your spouse, dog, car, children or parents), fixing Beta tape players, yodeling. Clothes. Anything purple, polka-dotted, fringed, flared, or ruffled. High heels. Fondue forks. Anything anthropomorphic: talking stuffed animals, fake birds, plastic turtles. If you are looking for these things, you are being gifted.

3 days to go: Spring spots

Did your favorite place survive the winter? The place you go with a friend to sit and talk and eat ring bologna on saltines? Have you been back, through the filthy parking lot, the padlocked gate, walked through the slush — should have worn boots — down the hill past the playground with its faded plastic horses and the shelter house, thinking how silly to come here so soon in spring? Finding the bench, looking out over the creek, the pond, the traffic, talking with the spirits.

4 days to go: Spring jog

Spring causes fat people. It must. Just look around (and a round), they're popping up and out all over. When you remove a layer of winter clothes, you reveal a layer of winter surplus. Don't sweat it. A quick trip to St. Vinny's will provide enough baggy clothing until the effects of spring training kick in. Pit-a-pat over blacktop wet with melting snow. From water-balloon jiggly, a good Spring workout can reduce anyone to a wheezing, red-faced, it's-the-big-one, can-I-sit-here-for-a-minute, athlete-in-progress. Don't overdo it. As if. All you need are comfy shoes. And a mirror. Let the morphing begin.

5 days to go: Spring break

Sure is quiet around here. The buses headed from Madison to Milwaukee ($34 round trip) and O'Hare ($37 round trip for a student) took on dozens of extra carriages for the Spring Break amnesty that began unofficially Friday. Students now have until March 23 to test the solar capacity and tensile strength of minuscule swatches of submersible triangle-shaped textiles (a bikini) in a mass marketing geologically diverse venue (a beach). Others will go home to Waukesha.

6 days to go: Spring fling

How could you? How could you not? Count the ways: flowers, smiles, encouragement, discouragement, more flowers. New pillowcases. Windows open. What is spring but one long frustrating, exhilarating, rewarding, punishing attempt to consummate something, anything? What doesn't spring have to do with romance? Have we met? Will we ever?

7 days to go: Spring bling

It delivers pigment to a color-starved palette. No straight lines or subtlety: not gray, not brown, not grayish-brown. Bring us the brights, the bold bling of spring, the swirling colors so easily coaxed into the open, into the warming day. There is no stopping the change now, or ignoring the growing number of chances to show it.

-- George Hesselberg