LETTERS FROM HOME: WHEN SNOW FALLS ON THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING

March 21, 1996

Dear Julie,

Snow arrived with the first day of spring. Is it a sign or just a disappointment? DC says the Farmer's Almanac predicts we'll get still one more dose of winter, but nobody here can stand the thought of it.

DC and lots of others were hoping for one last "snow day," a final breather from this interminable winter, but the big snow missed us and plastered the East.

DC also hoped her concert might be canceled. She's playing in a community orchestra and has discovered that picking up her flute again after its years on the shelf is not as easy as she'd thought. She has practiced hard, though, much to the consternation of our dog Hank, whose ears must be too attuned to the frequency of a flute. He whines miserably when she plays, which would be funny if DC weren't so concerned about hitting the high notes in the first place.

So I let Hank outside and Lucy just goes right on chewing whatever she's chewing.

DC's newly planted pansies and snapdragons have been covered with plastic in hopes they'll survive the latest freeze. Her first batch didn't make it through. Neither did the baby frogs that hatched in our backyard puddle.

We are literally dying for spring. For everything there is a season, and the season is past due.

My friend Jay is leaving the newspaper, moving to another corner of the state. He will leave behind a lot of people who call him friend, and the why of it has taught me the value of being just who you are and accepting others for just who they are.

Jay's a good bit younger than I am and our belief systems are almost mirror images -- that is to say opposites. Jay wears his biases like a badge while I try to understand mine away. He believes in unadulterated right and wrong, and I believe in what's right and wrong for you. His style is forcefully blunt, mine is finesse.

People who know Jay only through his writing love or hate him. And some who do know him personally react the way I often have to oppositional spirits in the past -- to stay out of their way.

But living is small when you only allow in people who act and believe as you do.

Mostly, people are fond of Jay because he's a member of the tribe Little Big Man joined: The Human Beings. Takes life head-on, like fourth and goal at the 1. Roars at hypocrisy. Is, in his way, Braveheart.

Often he hits a golf ball 45 degrees off the line of his aim, yet he never gives up.

The day Jay said he might be leaving, to my discredit I did not immediately jump up, pump his hand and congratulate him. You don't want to seem too happy to see someone go, even when you know he's on the verge of making a decision that will expand his sense of himself and living.

Besides, you give up your friends grudgingly, even for the best.

Lives align and crisscross in this mystery called time. A season for this, a time for that. A time to stay and a time to go. I think of friends like you left behind and yet never lost because each of us lets the other to be just who we are.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.