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Maybe Like The Rainbow, The Coast's Spring Is Reassuring
By MARIE LANGLOIS Daily Herald Staff Writer
A magnolia blossom, creamy white and green, was brought to The Daily Herald in Gulfport Tuesday by Mrs. John Morris Jr., North County Farm road west of Lyman.
‘So what?,’ is the first cynical thought that flashes through the mind.
This is the “So what?”
Mississippi’s state flower usually blooms in May and June. Here it is almost October. Why did it decide to bloom now?
|	There really is no answer to	that, so, blame it on Camille!
j	Since her visit, such spring	flowering shrubs and trees as
! the redbud, tung nut tree, Japanese magnolia, plum, pear and peach trees have all blossomed—out of season. Even the most dependable of weather vanes, the pecan tree, which never puts out its foliage before the last cold spell has gone, is arrayed in a new spring dress of bright green leaves.
Maybe Coast residents need the reassurance that there will be another spring with fresh bright growing things to cover the scars.
Maybe tod, like the rainbow, it is a promise.
Spring flowers in the fall are, to say the least, most unusual, but so was Camille a most unusual hurricane.
Stripped bare of their leaves, trees and shrubs may have been lulled into an early winter; but with the warm, moist, almost spring-like days of the	past few weeks the re-awaken-
i	ing began. Where there were	no leaves, new green ones ap-
peared, as on the weather-beaten oaks; where there were no blossoms, soft white, pale pink and white-pink flowers began to show out, as in the wild azaleas.
A nature lover and poet probably put it best when he wrote, “Beauty is its own excuse for being.”