Cold Tenth.

We're getting a little reminder this morning, a sort of don't-get-too-soft, don't-get-too-ready-for-June flag run up the pole: we're 36 degrees and genuinely chilly, gray and wet from a little early-morning rain, and we're headed maybe for a killing frost this evening. Items about which to worry: the leafed-out hydrangeas. The azalea up here by the WeatherDeck. Budded tulips. And the tree, always the tree— but I feel like we got the tree this year, and I don't want to get too greedy, so if 29 degrees takes out what's left of the petals, well, then, we got ours.


This is the sort of spring other, more regular places get, places like Franconia, Massachusetts, or some foggy damp Oregon town. Kansas. Places in Kansas get spring like this, don't they? A set-in cold day to remind you where you've come from. Down here on the Piedmont we have a tendency to relax too soon, to let a string of seven warm days become a kind of perfect sunny backyard golden calf. We let ourselves into April well before March is any kind of over. Which is reason enough to offer up a goat, actually, for a day like today: Here is another variety of spring, a kind which bears remembering, a kind that wants for you to drag that hooded sweatshirt out from the bottom drawer once more, perhaps. A kind that makes us just a little more kin to folks who have things like snowmelt. Whose flowering trees are only just now showing buds. Who never even put that sweatshirt back away in the first place.

It's cold. We got a tenth of an inch of rain. We may, if we're lucky, get a little bit more. Now put a hat on and get out there in it.