The rain finally came last week and lifted the woods into green life almost overnight, away from their hesitancy and stammering, and into full, heady, spring. Two weeks ago I trekked along a riverbank edge, water low, ground brown, sprinkling of leaves. Yesterday I could not even get close to the river, clogged and inundated with greenery, and the river itself churning in mud, four feet higher and completely transformed. I hacked my way through the undergrowth, and what had taken me five minutes two weeks ago, I had to give up on after an hour. The woods seethe with young life -- it is like a high school 1.2 seconds after the last bell rings for the day -- and nothing can stand in its way. It is an energy all its own, the great juvenile hum, and one can see why all the parasites of the world -- the marketers and the opinion shakers -- have reoriented the whole of society to its pulsations. But everything is not spring: though you would be hard pressed to keep that in mind watching cable, or stumbling through the wildly ecstatic undergrowth near the Leaside Bridge.