Low Spot.

Like a song sung again and again: every spring I ride into work, and at the creek-dip in the land that used to be Brightwood Farm and is now Brightwood Minimansions & Plywood Townhomes, LLC, I remember: cool air really does settle. I'm sure it's that way in winter, too, but windows-down in forty degrees, which is about all we could muster this winter, is still too chilly to notice the difference. Both in and back last night, a quick fact-checking drive and one of the very few I hope to make while gloriously on sabbatical, it was a good five degrees cooler in that hollow. I'd have tendered the horses down in there, too, if that's what they did with horses way back when. I'm not much for knowing what you do or did with horses.

Windows open here in the kitchen, and the little addition around the corner hammers and table-saws its way along. Birds. The season's first carpenter bees working the back eaves. The willows have popped leaves. Our dogwood is showing color. So is an azalea down the hill. There's a fierce storm complex up west and north of Galax, trying, maybe, to drag down over the mountains, but though it's on the radar, no one here, suited fancy or other, is making mention of it. Still: If we're going to be eighty degrees and change, which we are, I'd maybe hold a finger up into the breeze this afternoon once it's quittin' time. Crack open a cold one, if a cold one is your wont, and just listen out and see if there's any rumbling over the top of all this other spring.

It's far too warm. It's crazy warm. But yesterday late afternoon, in that warm breeze and low humidity and the locker-room smell of the Bradford pears, it was, i have to admit, very hard to complain.