It's early Saturday morning. Just after 4:00. The temperature has dropped by more than 25 degrees in a matter of eight hours. As promised, snow is arriving. Yesterday's warm, green, early spring grass will be blanketed white come sunup. Just now the ground is in that yielding stage when first flakes strike naked blades and melt away without so much as a whisper. The grass fights tiny rebellions against the certain cover, but these mutinies are short-lived. The snowfall is confident, undeviating. It is only a matter of time - minutes - before spring will patiently step back to give winter a brief, fleeting encore.

It is inevitable, though. Here in Oklahoma, the air has already warmed. The morels are already pushing through last fall's humus. The starlings have already filled the local oaks and elms and sycamores with their oily black cloaks and trilled chatter. The cardinals are already shouting their metallic *chip* to one another from treetops to set their coupling boundaries. Mockingbirds alight on the porch to presage each morning with a new impersonation. Migratory bats are returning to their favorite trees, some to gypsum caves, to hunt the new lush populations of flying beetles and smaller bats. The short grass prairies have already witnessed the beginning of the mating season of black-tailed prairie dogs. Their pups will be along any time in the next six weeks. The badgers who mated last summer, and whose embryos were arrested in their development through the winter, will be preparing grass-lined dens for the birth of their young. The rare red foxes and more common gray foxes are venturing further and further from their dens before dusk, chasing cottontails and squirrels, anticipating the predestined uncultivated crops of blackberries, elderberries, and partridgeberries. Not to mention the eager daffodils that have already grown bright and secure. In another day the sun and moon will share the sky with an egalitarianism they only demonstrate twice a year. The kingdom of spring is at hand, no matter what today's snow would like to recommend.