Every morning I am astonished again.

Last night, for example, the temperature was in the low 30s. In the middle of the night I wondered, with a more than academic interest, what had possessed me to shut off the coal furnace. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and asked myself: Have I been dreaming? Are there truly violets blooming out there - or are they just little plants turning purple from the cold?

Then morning came, and I went outside, and it was very much like being Dorothy, dropped abruptly into Oz: "Oh!" I said to the violets. "AH!" I said to the sun.

Yes, it's spring, they said in reply. It's spring in the Rockies.

I hope you don't expect anything intelligent from this essay. In spring my higher functions shut down at about the same time my furnace does. My concentration wavers and wanders. I am tugged in a thousand directions by the new green fingers of the trees, ambushed over and over again by the sudden brightness of flowers. Things unravel and drift past me like pollen through the soft air.

"What did you say? Excuse me ... what was that? (do you smell those violets?) I beg your pardon (was that a hummingbird?) Did you say something? Sorry."

My friends repeat themselves tolerantly and wink at each other when I'm not looking. I apologize and pretend to pay attention. But how can I? What are we doing talking at a time like this anyway? We should be caroling, dancing, declaiming poetry! Why speak when you can sing?

I'd rather cast my lot with the poets and declare with e.e. cummings that "Wholly to be a fool / while spring is in the world / my blood approves ..."

Because they have it right, the poets, not the practical people who insist on business as usual. The practical people run things and usually get their way. But who with any senses -- as opposed to drab empirical sense -- would not prefer to dally with the daffodils? Aspen leaves are unfurling around us, even as we sleep!

And I don't want to go to work, or balance my checkbook, or have serious conversations about current events. I want to write an epic poem about dandelions, or sing arias to the earthworms. I want to quit my job and be a French Impressionist painter and wander the orchards all day painting and spend the evenings drinking absinthe at the sidewalk café, until the absinthe makes my heart grow fonder.

Well, perhaps I'll have to skip the café., and maybe hang on to the dayjob, too. But I will go out and paint when I can - it's the least I can do.

I have been stalking spring since the end of February.

I'd gone for a walk, out looking at winter, and thinking how stern and simple the season was, in its beautiful bony way. Colors straight from a fairy tale: white, white snow and coal-black branches and wild rose hips as red as blood. In a winter mood I made my way, and my thoughts were pure and serene.

Then, I crossed a frozen creek, and something snaked out and tantalized me: an unexpected whiff of wet earth. I stopped, entranced, and thought: that smell. How long has it been since I met such a smell? For in winter most smells go into hibernation; things are locked away inside themselves, or hidden well under the ground.

But in that cold place the smell of wet earth was rich and plump and brown and juicy. It spoke of sap and leaves and water. It prophesied thawing and growing.

As I stood there, dreaming, the snow began again, and the secret earth smell vanished away. But now I listened, too, and heard a new thing: I heard the water chattering under the ice. And above me, invisibly, I began to hear birds: the trees were filling with red-winged blackbirds.

It is unlocking, I thought, it is breaking up with music. Spring is cracking open its doors.

I don't know why anyone wants to live in places without distinct seasons. The circling seasons are always the same and every year they are different; they teach us to trust in the passing of time, and to celebrate our place in it.

I always know the moment that each spring begins in me: how all of my senses run wild and forage. It doesn't matter how cranky I was, back in the darkness of January. In the early days of spring I feel transparent as the rain; utterly new and flawless as the earliest leaves of trees.

I can't help myself, I buttonhole friends and fix them with a wild and glittering eye: "Do you smell those lilacs? Do you hear that meadowlark? Do you see how gold the willows are, against that dark-blue stormcloud sky?"

"Excuse me," my friends reply. "Did you say something?"

Ahhh ... I think; and then, Never mind. For they are also adrift on the season. The violets have taken them hostage, too.

Diane Sylvain is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News, based in Paonia, Colorado (www.hcn.org). She worships Spring in western Colorado