Spring Rites.

The lawnmower started. I had been thinking, even though we're raiding the couch cushions for lunch money over here, that this would be the year we'd have to break down and buy a new mower, but now I know: I'll never buy a new mower. You cannot break that mower. I've worked at it steadfastly since 2003, and it wasn't new then. It came with the house. The old house. Things I have done or left undone in regards to that mower: Mice, hail, wind, cold, heat, blunt force trauma, rust, fog, snow, ants. I've never checked the oil, much less changed it. I have struck rocks with it and struck it with rocks. And yet it new-season started more easily this year than any other I can remember. I am given to love for things. I know this. Still. I may love the mower.

The yard, on the other hand, is another story. I have neglected it, and, even mowed, it shows.

Friends and fans of the abrupt and violent change of season, I could go on here at length in the eighty-degree single-digit April wind (with gusts surely into the 20 and 30 mph range), but I think that I instead must say: if you live west of the mountains, please call east to let us know what's still in your yard and what's in Oz. If you live here in the ANYLF viewing area, tarp down your mowers. Tie down everything else. The fancies are saying we may see see 60 mph straight-line winds, which would be plenty enough to take out deck chairs and bird feeders, to say nothing of trees and suspect roofs. It is nearly eight in the evening and the still-lit western sky is absolutely empty, but the radar looks nasty, and the probability matrix bullshit that the entity formerly known as the Weather Channel—have you seen that thing lately? Who do they think they are? Why does the weather have to get sexified? This is the beauty of the weather: It starts off sexy. It does not need more music than they used to inflict on it back in the glory days of, say 2003, when the mower was a little shinier and the Weather Channel was a little weatherier—anyway, the You-Are-Or-Were-Here DEFCON Death Star Duck-and-Cover 2011 SituStorm GraphiScare thing they have over there says we are lined up for a noisy night. A dog-in-the-bed night, and perhaps the first enaction (isn't that a word?) of the Scared-Toad-in-the-Bed policy, active only during active storms. We don't even know if he's scared of storms yet. But I have pushed for a policy just in case.

Let's let that be that. Eighty today. Sixty tomorrow. The space between those two numbers says the storms they're saying are coming must be coming. Y'all be safe out there on the Piedmont. Lock the windows so they don't rattle and bang and wake the babies. Once we get through tomorrow night's frost, the rest of the week looks positively springlike. I love a good storm. Knowing it's give or take my responsibility to keep the Toad from being hailed upon shifts that math around some, but I still do love a good storm.