RIVER CITY JOURNAL: MEDICAL ALERT: SPRING FEVER IS ON A WILD RAMPAGE

Let me plant a few annuals, and I think the worst of my symptoms will fade away into the heat and humidity of summer.

I have spring fever so bad I'm ready to go to the emergency room, which, of course, is the local garden supply store, where the physicians of flora have a cure for what ails me. I know they do. I've had the treatments before.

The fact that this winter has been more of a long, early spring -- since about the end of November, I'd say -- has contributed to the fever symptoms. There have been no two-foot snows or minus-20 nights to make us think about survival. Instead, the rains -- have you had enough yet? -- have only speeded up the onset of a full raging fever that makes you delirious enough to imagine crab-apple trees in full bloom before trout season opens.

Wait. That's not my imagination. The crab-apple trees ARE blooming. And so are the forsythia bushes, and the daffodils and crocuses. I noticed my honeysuckle is flowering too.

Last fall I saw a display of pansies at a garden store, and I was told that you could grow them outdoors all winter long. I didn't know that. So my wife went back to the store a few days later and bought several plants which I set out just outside the big northeast window of the family room (east window if your taking directions from my wife -- but that that's another story).

I can't say the pansies have flourished since last fall, but they have stayed green, and they have bloomed all winter long, yellow and purple, with their happy-face blossoms staying close to the ground.

Both my wife and I have wondered why there were never many blossoms at one time. We found out one morning this week when we spotted one of the two neighborhood rabbits grazing in the back yard. The bunny edged toward the pansies and soon was muching on a yellow blossom. He (I'm just guessing it's a he) hopped over to a purple bloom and wiggled his nose but didn't seem to have an appetite for anything but yellow. He also managed to nip off the fresh green leaves, which explains why the pansies haven't grown taller.

In the past week I've managed to find several excuses to be in the yard, digging and poking and scratching. The limestone post rock from central Kansas is standing upright again, having been placed in an appropriate hole. Several bare patches of lawn have been seeded and mulched. I've planted some wild ferns we gathered last weekend in the Ozarks near Shady Nook School on Greenwood Valley.

I've noticed the displays of garden gear at all the big stores. You know what I'm talking about: the spring bulbs and fertilizer and lawn mowers and hose and sprinklers and barbecue grills and lawn furniture and ... . It's the kind of merchandising magic that makes you so dizzy (spring-fever vapors, I call it) that you load up a shopping cart -- no, make that two shopping carts -- of things you absolutely must have to save the world from its bareness.

There is no sucker for these siren calls of springtime than the sucker typing this column with dirt under his fingernails from digging in the too wet soil around the house.

Hey, if I didn't have this fever thing, I'd know better. But I'm sick. Really sick.

I think a new gas-powered edger and about a dozen flats of annuals should do the trick. I'd tell you more about my springtime malady, but I hear there's a new supply of those great big clay pots at ... .

And, I could use a good dose of sassafras tea right now. Remember when you used to go find sassafras roots in the spring? I'm not paying much attention to those FDA warnings about how drinking several gallons of sassafras tea at one time can cause liver damage, or some such. Good grief, if I drank several gallons of anything, I'd have a lot more than my liver to worry about. Fortunately, I've never been dumb enough to down that much sassafras tea at a time. A mug or two is fine with me. With lots of sugar.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.