Lucky Numbers.

Is it cold today? a friend asked. It is. It is cold. But I know how she feels, that way of stepping outside and not being sure. There's something in the water this week, something almost paralyzing, something that makes it hard to know anything for sure other than that if the barking dogs across the street do not stop barking then I am going to start the kind of war that can only end with my neighbors running over my flowerbed on purpose with their stupid Ford Taurus station wagon and then me going over there and pouring a coffee can of gasoline in the center of their yard and tossing a match in after it and being all like, How do you like the suburbs now, shitbags?

All these polls. Nobody ever calls here.

If the daffodils—have I mentioned the daffodils?—if the daffodils can hang on through tonight's freeze as well as they seem to have hung on through last night's, then I think our little premature spring will keep on keeping on. Tulips are starting to edge up everywhere. I myself, edging-up-wise, am starting to kick around the notion of filling the big pots out back with lettuces again, sowing the seeds in their little lines, then engaging full-bore in the inside-outside dance to keep the seedlings from freezing all through March and April, dragging those big pots in and out of the writing shed each evening, each morning. Lettuce. Arugula. Spinach.

There is the chance of showers tomorrow night, the last day of February, a free day, a leap day, one last shot at the raffle, one more chance at the .05" my $2.99 orange plastic rain gauge says we need to hit our historical average for the month. Three times out of four it'd be March. Three times out of four we'd miss. I, though, am the kind of fool who will take a little rain shower tomorrow night as a sign. Who will look out at the daffodils and think, goddamn, it was 23 degrees, and we still made it.

Dogs. Barking. Something comes next.