Hey, look! Spring!

The farm fields are still frosting-ed in white, on my drive west these winter mornings. The world is still a cold, silent, monochrome place here in the northern climes, the air still icebox frigid at sunup, the roads still white with salt and beginning to take on the carpet-bombed look of Pothole Season.

But there are signs now, as February hits its mid-point. Winter's grip, almost imperceptibly, is beginning to loosen.

The light comes earlier, and it lingers longer. The sun feels ever so slightly warmer when it hits your face. And then, of course, there is this:

Stock cars on my TV screen again.

The magic words "pitchers and catchers report", accompanied by the familiar geometry of a baseball diamond, its greens and beiges so vivid you almost have to shield your eyes.

This week the latter is happening all over Arizona and Florida, and with it comes the first hint of that season we most experience with our senses. You can see all that green and beige. The scent of grilled meat, that trace memory of spring and summer, returns. Soft breezes, warm sun, the pop of a baseball in a glove, the crack of it meeting a tooled piece of hickory: It's all flooding back.

And then you turn on your TV, and, yes, there are the stock cars.

It's Daytona week down there in Florida, and if there is a first sign of spring for me, that is it. The return of all those crazy folks flying in formation around the Daytona banking means spring, and then summer, can't be far off now. Darrell Waltrip's tired boogety-boogety-let's-go-racin' schtick might be a candidate for the back of the closet, but on this one Sunday afternoon, it's also a herald.

Ain't just a rumor, boys, it whispers. Spring's comin'. I got it on good authority.

I am not, as a matter of record, particularly a NASCAR fan. This is mostly a function of my age; I'm old enough to remember when stock car racing was a purely southern thing, rambunctious and redneck-y and full of actual characters with names like Tiny and Fireball and Curtis and Junior.  The  corporate hawkers who've inherited their legacy, and the antiseptic, manufactured rambunctiousness of what is more product than sport now, pales in comparison.

They may still call Kyle Busch "Rowdy." But back in the day, they would have called him that because he actually was.

Of course, I've always been more of an IndyCar guy, so there is that at work, too. But for this one week?

I am a NASCAR guy. Spring has sprung.