Edwin Way Teale writes in his book North With the Spring, "Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide."
In flat Chicago, springtime washes in from the south in small tides of singing birds and early wildflowers, but soon rushes in a green flood of leafy trees and thick grass. At Goose Island, one of the first signs of spring is pairs of geese patrolling the turning basin and cropping the nearby lawns of industrial parks.
