Stolen Weather.

The half-fractured sunlight we've got on the backyard this morning makes the grass back there look almost green. Three or four new daffodils bloomed overnight in all that warm mist and fog— they picked up nearly two inches in Atlanta, but most of that stayed south, and what we got was a kind of warm outflow, the temperature edging upwards all night, and then a couple of showers totaling give or take a tenth of an inch. The evening dogwalk was coolish, but by the time we were doing the dishes from dinner we had both doors open, had all that wet spring air softening the papers and receipts and book page edges. You can smell it out there: they're getting spring somewhere, and out front of the cold front that's headed our way this afternoon, we're getting their air.

This'll be one of those teasers, then: By midweek it will be winter again, and next weekend we'll edge back over into spring. We tilt back and forth while the jet stream tries to figure out what it wants. It's still February, I keep telling myself. An old friend likes to remind me, when we meet by the meat case in the Harris Teeter, that it always snows in March. He's got a coconut in his office that he rubs for luck when he needs it to snow: someone sent him that thing from Hawaii just as it is, wrote his address on it with a marker and stamped it and sent it through the mail.

The light looks sanctified. A morning like this is a good morning to have the truck, windows down and a mug of coffee and a ride to work listening to the BBC explain to me how it is or should have been in any number of their far-flung outposts worldwide. By tonight I'll need the jacket and watchcap for the ride home. Sometimes I'm such a sucker that it seems like every season is my favorite season. So long as days like today are on the big wheel, though, so long as when we spin this remains one of the possibilities, then I'm OK.