Well, spring arrived just after noon yesterday, giving us today the first full day of the green season.

Like every year, it is welcome and has arrived none too soon.

For such a short month, February can go on forever. The lengthening days do their tease, but it is still a winter month, a month of darkness and cold. While December and January in many ways invite you to embrace the season, February only induces hibernation. You want to be done with the sweaters and the boots, but you can't be.

Personally, I could sleep the month away (and it probably appears to some that I do just that, sleepwalking through the month).

Thank goodness for years with a winter Olympics to provide some light and warmth.

March can also be a tease, but it also backs up its talk with the goods.

I walked outside the other day for a breath of fresh air and was greeted by the distinctive "cronk, cronk, cronk" of a V of sandhill cranes flying overhead. They were aimed northwest, headed, I suppose, for Canada, Alaska and even Siberia where they spend their summers. The sight and sound of them in a crystalline sky took me along on the journey, if only for a moment.

Meanwhile, green fingers of tulip and daffodil shoots are poking up through the gray-brown earth.

And in the best cardinal-spotting time of year, the redbirds sit in trees before the leaves appear chanting the season's anthem, "re-do, re-do, re-do."

Why the new year arrives in the dead of winter, I'll never understand. You make resolutions that the moribund months shatter and destroy in no time. The new year is now.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer. Reach him at Brian.Williams@nwi.com or (219) 548-4348.