Late Spring.

We emerge from early-onset TLK winter (requirement: it's been hot; it's now not; one can sit on the front porch in jeans and long sleeves during a late spring/early summer calendar month when one arguably should not be able to sit on porch in same; it's gray) and into this last gentle May day, I fear, before May remembers what it's meant to be about and renders unto Caesar etcetera, which is to say, the weekend forecast calls for high eighties and long, long sentences. Not much rain in that five-day, either, and not much in the ten. Tomorrow it may be summer. Consider this your fair warning. If you are not out in the yard and garden and riding around with the windows down and sidewalking your dogs and toads down to the park, then you're doing it wrong.

Birds. The first crickets. Birds again. Everything green, but hanging hard onto that spring green, the lighter shades. We have not fallen into the spinach-green of full summer just yet. Daylilies blooming around the city and verging on it here at the forecast. Coneflowers. Blackeyed Susans. The pansies pulled out and the summer annuals, late but looking fine, in their flats in the empty beds. The Toad like a lit match, a firecracker you're still holding in your hand, going a hundred miles a minute for about 72 hours and then collapsing yesterday afternoon and this morning into hours-long naps, trying to sleep off all the discovery.

I burned a gentle fire yesterday morning in the shed, as much to take the humidity down as to take the chill off. Still. May 18 and a fire in the woodstove. 85 degrees by the time we see May 21. Keep an eye on the weather. We're having most of it at once.