Clearing Off.

The front's through. I slept with the windows open last night under the promise of thunderstorms, but no such luck. A quarter-inch, all counted. There's a sure warmness in the air. Daffodils nosing up all over the neighborhood. Winter Jasmine blooming down the block. This happened last year, too. I remember one year on my birthday we sat on the porch on Carr Street and made French fries outside because it was so crazy warm. But I also remember that as being an anomaly. Now it feels like we can be pretty much guaranteed a handful of sixty-degree days each in December and January and February. Makes the late-spring freezes all the worse.

The clouds are clipping by west to east and sun and blue sky is filling in behind them, a stiff breeze and the smell of wet soil everywhere. I get the feeling it's as warm now as it will be all day, though, and as we sift through the afternoon maybe it'll start to feel at least a little bit more like it should.

Out back, that novel might be taking shape. It's an odd rhythm I'm in, one that makes it tough for me to carry on conversations even with the woman at the U-Scan at the grocery store. I'm sometimes so far deep down inside my own head that coming back up and out is more trouble than it's worth, and so when she tells me to Have a nice evening, often enough the best I can do is grunt, or give her what must probably look like some kind of bent clown leer, and carry my Yukon Golds back out to the car.

I think the weather's broken. I'm not making any scientific climatological claim here. Nothing long-term. I'm just saying that today the weather's broken, and that through that fracture has come something better suited for coastal Mississippi. They want to give us back some frost and freeze for next week. Good by me.