Unseasonably Warm.

There was a fog so heavy the street and everything else was wet, but I don't think that's going to count for the precipitation ticker over there in the sidebar. It's warm. Short sleeves warm. There's a tribe of people out there who say 'shirt sleeves.' I am not of that tribe.

We're headed for almost seventy today and better than that tomorrow and the song birds are out, the ones that are here, anyway, and the only real difference between today and mid-April is the smell: in April it smells like spring. Today it smells like not much. The streets, in the shade where they're still wet, smell like wet street.

There are tasks, then: lights off the porch, wreath off the door, tree out of the house. The season has changed. That it has changed into whatever this is is no matter. Keep the lights on the house too long and I run the risk of becoming the old man down the street, in shirt sleeves and pajama pants, standing out in his yard leaning on a Harris Teeter grocery cart underneath his two window signs that say MERRY CHRISTMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR and PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TO MEN. Red letters on white boards. They've hung in those windows regardless of season since I've lived here. He's got an American flag on a flagpole out in the red clay of his front yard. He flies that thing in all weathers. I wave. He does not wave back. Sometimes he makes a kind of guttural sound at the dog.

We're supposed to cool back down and even get a little rain after tomorrow. That might make it OK to enjoy this while it lasts. Still. It's odd. Something's not altogether right here. We know what season it isn't. Just hard to tell which one it is.