Warm Mornings.

It's been too long since I've been at this: This is the refrain of the Toad, of the end of a term I'm not even teaching my way through, of the end of a novel I'm not finished with, of the doldrums—can we have doldrums this time of year?—of April. We weren't this way last week. We were full of cold rain, of bright cool days after that. Today we have graduation weather, though, hot and muggy and headed for the mid-eighties for sure, the air handler on the credit union building screaming away, the second one harmonizing from the church. The grass is tall. The weeds are in. The tomatoes, though, are also in, which is one way to measure. Maybe it's the only measure. If they weren't in I'd be prostrate on the porch, watching them wilt in their peat cups, wondering what the hell was coming next. Now I know: Tomatoes, hopefully, just out in front of the Yellow Death (called Early Blight by those with knowledge of such things; I have no knowledge—only gloom).

Forecast: storms Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, which means this may not be the week to side the gable end of the ongoing money sink that is the writing shed, though the time is nigh: my building permit's one-year anniversary rides closer, which means so too does the one horseman of the city apocalypse, stopping by to do whatever he does if I don't make it. One side. A couple hundred bucks of cedar. Then two hundred other tiny things, like caulking crown molding, but maybe they'll let me slide: If it didn't leak in what became the Raleigh storms, and if it didn't leak in our own smaller tornadoes the week before, then surely I've built to permit, no? No. Who knows. You never know. Every time it rains hard I go out there looking for water. Every time, knock on wood, it has thus far been dry.

I feel spent. Dried up. It's hot. I do have good tomatoes. There's that, then, if nothing else. The Toad went back to school this morning after a long spring break week. Quiet around here. I miss him, and I don't. He cut two teeth last week. Two more teeth. Put that in your almanac and smoke it.