Finally, like sugar cubes in hot coffee, the packed snows of winter have melted before your very eyes, the sun-god has benevolently stamped the northern hemisphere This Side Up for another six months and household furnaces across the land have gone into their slack season. Spring is here to stay. Out on the west coast, where they have a headstart on the rest of Canada in beginning the new year, the flower children in Vancouver's Stanley Park are already wearing daffodils in their hair, suburban lawns are alive with powermowers, the town fool jumps for laughs over psychedelic-painted boulders and the old folks are walking in peaceful tranquility through the cathedral atmosphere of the big trees. But the other provinces have also come astir. The white-throated sparrows - those ever-welcome tourists from the south - are calling their much appreciated I Love... Canada, Canada, Canada from the eastern thickets, the frog ponds are alive with denizens super active after months of deep sleep in frozen mudbanks and turtles lethargically sun themselves on log and rock-shelf. A young motorcyclist, on gleaming machine, roars joyfully down a city street devoid of ice, at last, and a rider urges his eager horse's pounding hooves along the muting moss-carpeted trails of a rural parkland. Nearby, amid the rustling stillness of a duck swamp, men with time to spare for such things, pole a rickety boat from big tree to big tree and with ladder and ropes affix high on each trunk an outsize nesting box, making ready for the beautifully-colored wood ducks who will soon come that way. In the orchards, peach and apple trees are carefully pruned, seedlings planted in long neat rows and new areas added to the vineyards. Farmers plant their crops in the moist sweet-smelling soil, cattle are let out to graze and wander in freedom over rolling pastureland and the young of many animals, some in coddled domesticity, others in the self-reliancy-demanding wilderness, come forth to continue nature's pageant. Among the slipways of marinas and yacht clubs an army of boating enthusiasts is here with paintbrush and needle and palm, making all shipshape for next weekend when they will once more listen to the slap of wavelets against racing hull. The first gaily-striped metal fishing lures are being dragged among the weedbeds where the big pike and wall-eyes lurk and in the homes of those select anglers, the purist fly-fishermen, lines, reels and gossamer tufts of fine hair and delicate wings are being meticulously groomed for The Day. In the shopping centres the garden shops are abustle with thousands of little (and big) green-fingered men and women, golf balls are selling like hot cakes, camping equipment that would make the old sour-doughs spit in their graves is demonstrated in the benign atmosphere of the stores' sporting goods sections, and here and there a parent thinking back over the decades to a less-sophisticated past, buys a small child a modest bag of glass alleys to flip among the patio's automated barbeque equipment. And across the whole wide varied map of Canada are the rich subtle scents, the eye-sweet sights of growth and resurgence and the harmonious sounds of a new year of life beginning afresh. Spring is come upon the land.