Column: Spring is tantalizingly close

As I write this, the morning sun is shining through the window, warming the left side of my body almost to the point that a good blanket and a small pillow would send me over the edge into a deep sleep.

On Wednesday, as I left the office about 6:30, I walked out in shirtsleeves and noted how nice it was even at that hour with the sun completely out of the sky.

But the warming weather is just one reminder that spring is just around the corner.

My email in-box has been bombarded with reminders that the registration deadline for spring softball is drawing close.

My daughter, though she runs slower than an old man in a walker, and can't hit the ball if it was on a tee, loves the game and insists on signing up every spring and every fall.

The fall season, honestly, seems like an afterthought. But the spring season, when every ball field at the town park is full of softball and baseball players of all shapes and sizes, is an exciting place to be.

The noises are exciting. The parents yells drift from one field to another. The lawn chairs line the fences down the first- and third-base lines.

For an hour or so, once or twice a week, I get to put aside the work of the day and watch my daughter have fun along with 10 or 12 of her buddies.

It makes me yearn for spring from the first day of summer until the last day of winter.

Of course, spring brings another nice benefit.

I ran into a friend of mine last week who runs the local oil company in Wendell. He said this had been a rough winter for his company because it had been unseasonably warm and his customers hadn't needed much oil. As one of his oil customers, I secretly cheered as I sympathized with him.

But the spring brings lower utility bills for everybody, no matter how you heat your home. Windows are flung open to heat your home from Mother Nature. The air conditioning won't be turned on for another few months. Spring breezes make the curtains flutter throughout the house and it just seems like the entire world has come alive.

And, to be sure, that's what spring does. The grass grows (yes, that's the one bad thing about spring), the leaves return to the trees and the sky seems to be gray much less than it was over the past few months.

Over the next few weeks, we'll still have to deal with the ups and downs of the seasons as they change. There will be more cold days ahead. We might even get a snowfall before everything is said and done. But all that uncertainty leads to the certainty that when the temperatures slowly rise, and the cheers rumble at the local baseball field, we'll all walk with a little bit of spring in our step and we'll bask in the glory of rejuvenation, even as we rush from one appointment to the next.