Cold Again.

Wander out there in one layer to start the fire and you'll be sorry and sad and halfway through your second cup of coffee before the notion that yesterday existed at all starts to feel like some kind of brilliant lie, a shiny thing just off the horizon. Yesterday: sixties, more sun than not, the smell of spring, a jacketless dogwalk down the hill and into the 6 pm sunset. This morning pulls itself up right around 30, though, with that white-gray winter sky that says February. It's still February. We might be barely starting to tilt—they want fifties for the end of the weekend into next week, and the daffodils are pushing through the ruined backyard soil—but it's so thoroughly cold again this morning that I caught myself appraising the woodpile, counting seasoned versus green, counting February and March days, wondering about ordering a second half-cord.

And then I put match to my neighbor's manila-foldered medical records, Hefty bags of which he gave to me for the express purpose of destruction via firestarting, and that stove hops to life, and all is, if not alright, then certainly survivable.

No squirrels. Flocks of waxwings two days in a row. Closing in on the end of the second-to-last chapter. A little love affair brewing with the Toad. Pickuped him back and forth to the Harris-Teeter yesterday. He liked that. I liked that. I explained to him about cowboys and foolishness and the general dumbassery of men, and told him to avoid all that as long as he could. He considered that on the way home, then put a lemon in his mouth.