Summer Breeze.

It's not summer. It isn't. But it feels like we're on the threatening edge of one of those years where we never do get the long glorious spring— not that this spring hasn't been glorious, but it hasn't really been all that long, or consistent. We've not had the weeks in a row where the windows in the house are all thrown open. We do get those years down here on the Piedmont where we'll sort of slide along, and everything will bloom, and then it'll be 93 degrees on graduation day in late May, and that'll be it. We bake the rest of the way through summer.


Let me not though lodge complaints against a day like this, which opens cool in the shade and definitionally sunny and filled well up with our late azaleas and sees our two nesting pairs of robins still hanging on and all other manner of bird all over the yard and bluebirds moving into our bluebird house out back, which means I suppose that there are not tufted titmice in there after all but rather, on the doorstep, whatever passes as a FOR RENT sign in the animal kingdom. AMR: Why do bluebirds live in boxes? Why doesn't anything else? ANYLF: That is a deep and abiding mystery, and when you're old enough, my dear, I'll tell you all about it.

Bluebirds want "open country and farmland," Peterson says. Very happy to have the back yard classified as such.

Storms are in the forecast for the next few days. I like that. Brings an urgency to things like yard work. Makes not doing yard work — makes sitting out here on the WeatherDeck with the dog and having another and another cup of coffee — feel illicit.