Back Porch

"Tell me your diamonds."This is one of many memorable lines in "Beloved," the film adapted from Toni Morrison's book that opens in theaters on Friday. The title character, a strange, otherworldly girl, is asking her mother, played by Oprah Winfrey, to tell the story of a long-lost pair of shiny crystal earrings.But when Winfrey - who has spent 10 years bringing Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen - recently met with the press in Chicago, she was not wearing crystal. She was wearing very real, very big diamonds that dangled voluptuously from her ears.

The clocks have sprung ahead, and it would be light in the early evening if it weren't for the grayness of the rain. Spring -- tantalizing, seductive -- showed its face last week, but only for a few days. A few gloriously, unseasonably hot days, wonderful days of T-shirts and shorts that hadn't been worn since the Labor Day barbecue. Days spent sweeping out the back porch and cleaning out the garage and folding up the comforters, which seemed suddenly so extraordinarily heavy, only to find 48 hours later that the thin sheets we had flung across the bed were bare and hardly comforting in the cold nighttime drizzle.

County police identified yesterday the body of the man who was found hanged on the back porch of the Bay Country Children's Learning Center Wednesday morning.The body of Phillip Andrew Wysocki, 28, of the 100 block of Cardamon Drive in Gingerville Manor Estates, was discovered about 9 a.m. Wednesday by a teacher at the day care center in the 100 block of Admiral Cochrane Drive.Mr. Wysocki's death is being listed as suspicious, police said. The exact cause of death will be determined by the state medical examiner, they said.

FiresWestminster: Firefighters from Pleasant Valley, Reese and New Windsor assisted Westminster at 6: 13 a.m. Tuesday, responding to a fire alarm in the 1200 block of Tech Drive. The time units were out was unavailable.Westminster: Firefighters responded at 1: 18 p.m. Tuesday to a mulch fire on Route 140 at Gorsuch Road. Units were out 10 minutes.PoliceWestminster: A resident of East Main Street told police Monday that the hood of her vehicle was scratched while it was parked in the Longwell Street parking lot. Damage was estimated at $200.

About 2,500 gallons of diesel fuel spilled at a rest area on Interstate 70 yesterday morning after a tanker was ruptured by an improperly attached wheel.The driver, an employee of Baltimore Tank Lines Inc., was attempting to fix a wheel on the 8,000-gallon capacity vehicle shortly after 8 a.m. when the tank slipped from the hitch and burst open, said Lt. Michael Gearhart of the Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services.Fire and rescue workers siphoned several hundred gallons of oil from a nearby tributary of the Patuxent River.

A one-alarm fire at a Southeast Baltimore house killed a boy last night, fire officials said.The boy, who fire officials said was 6 or 7 years old, was in full cardiac arrest when firefighters found him in a third-floor rear bedroom. He was taken to the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, where he was pronounced dead soon after arrival.The fire started shortly after 10: 30 p.m. in a rear room on the first floor of the three-story brick house in the 1400 block of Bank St., between Fells Point and Little Italy.

Gunfire yesterday evening in the Brooklyn Homes section of Baltimore killed a female driver and wounded her male passenger and a woman sitting on a porch, police said. Names of the victims were not released and no arrests had been made, police said. Shortly before 6 p.m., a woman was driving a Toyota sedan in the 4100 block of Mariban Court and was being followed by a white Cadillac, said Sterling Clifford, a city police spokesman. Near the intersection of 10th Street, Clifford said, someone in the Cadillac fired several shots into the Toyota, striking the driver and passenger.

A $2,000 telescope, powerful enough to enable the viewer to observe mountain ranges and shadows on the moon, was stolen from the enclosed back porch of a Linwood home Sunday night.Richard J. King, who received the the electric clock-drive telescope as a Christmas present in 1991, said it was mounted on a self-leveling sealed tripod.Mr. King said the Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope has an 8-inch reflector that brings Jupiter, the largest planet of the solar system and the fifth in distance from the sun, into view at the size of a quarter.

A 22-year-old Havre de Grace man who was put out of the house by his stepfather during a family dispute has been accused of returning 90 minutes later and setting a fire in an upstairs bedroom while his parents slept downstairs, authorities said yesterday.Scott Demaree of the 900 block of Quarry Road was arrested at the scene at 12:30 a.m. yesterday by state fire marshals and charged with arson and reckless endangerment, said Bob Thomas, deputy state fire marshal.Mr. Demaree was being held at the Harford County Detention Center in lieu of a $200,000 bond, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Office said.

One man died and three of his relatives were taken to an area hospital yesterday after a fire ravaged an Essex mobile home, authorities said yesterday. County firefighters who responded about 3 p.m. to the first block of Dovetail Lane were told by neighbors that someone was inside, said Elise Armacost, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore County Fire Department. As firefighters extinguished the fire they found a man dead in the living room, Armacost said. The man lived in the home with his mother and his disabled adult brother, she said.