Monday, April 14, 2008

One More.

There's a picture of me I rather like — a rarity — hanging in the bar in the library, a little 3x5 snapshot of me leaning on the car in some worn-through jeans and a long-sleeved Boulevard Bolt t-shirt ( I own no other kind of long-sleeved t-shirt) and a gray watchcap that's long since lost its shape and never fit quite right anyway, and the dog is there, too, huge and orange and full of winter fur and lying there on the sidewalk, and the light is long and yellow and the Carr Street wisteria — this is from when I lived on Carr Street — are in full cascading purple bloom all along the power line running overhead, and it's cold, and you can tell it's cold even from the light and not just the watchcap, and this is all to say: It is always and every year cold in April, and sometimes I will go out there and stand in it.

I have no idea who took the photo. Wasn't me. I'm in the thing.

It's cold and rainy now, and it's supposed to hang on that way until it gets cold and clear tomorrow. The fancies are a little all over the place in regard to tomorrow night — surprise! — but it just somehow feels like tomorrow will be a bedsheets-on-the-azaleas night. NOAA wants frost. Patchy frost, anyway. TWC wants 30 degrees. The locals want it a little milder. We lost the goddamn azaleas last year when it snapped cold and then sleeted all in my bedsheets. At least tomorrow night they want dry. And just one night of it. I can hang everybody on through one night of it.

I love that photo mainly for the dog, who looks like she just could not be any happier than for it to be cold one more time while she's still got the right fur for it. I'm myself today trying for that same state of mind. We have not quite earned spring just yet, even if I do have maybe 75 tulips blooming all through the front yard, or even if the wisteria, Carr Street and otherwise, are blooming all over town. Here is one last little shot of cold. Could be worse: Atlanta's getting freeze watches and warnings. We're so far spared that up here. Our rain came at the right time, for starters. And as long as my azaleas ride it out today and tomorrow, then the weather has my full and complete permission to behave as it likes.

Supposed to be almost 70 on Wednesday. No photographs hanging in the bar of days like that, I don't think.

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