Still Warm.

Oh, the day: class outside even as class outside meant fiasco, like always, meant nine kids trying so hard to give a damn about four good poems and failing as often as not. And we did have four good poems, which is a better day than so many days, but the four good poems could not quite compete with seventies and sun and sun and seventies. Oh, the day.

Gonna be cold soon enough. Warm again, too, but all I'm saying is, Go outside. Now, tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening. House finches in both of the ferns now. Spring trying so hard to come on. We're not ready yet, but we're damn near there. Now come the cold snaps. Now come the frozen Bradford Pears. Happens every year like this. We can never bring it on all nice and easy-like. Always back and forth. But still: We are, I am telling you here in early March, damn near there.

Daylight Saved.

Or so they say. I won't believe it until tonight, when it's seven and still not dark. And I was in dire need of the switch, lost and gone hour or no: those 6:15 sunrises had started to wear thin.

We're 75 degrees and hugely sunny here on the front porch, with what I'd say is something between a gusty breeze and a breezy wind coming in out of the west and south. A pair of house finches are trying to nest in one of our new ferns, which is no good, since it's not really fern time and the plan was to bring them in next week or the week after to avoid what has to be a coming freeze. Now that plan is null and house-finchingly void. Plus we'll have to have a dead damn fern hanging on the porch post-freeze until the whole finch-making process runs its course. It's tough going here at 709, friends and fans of spring rites. Tough going, indeed.

The Bradford Pears, for those of you scoring at home, are right on the verge of blooming. The dogwoods look quite close. Some switch got flipped here in the new back yard and one of our varieties of weed is sending up tiny pale white blooms. It is right about on us. Best to make yourselves ready. Don't put the flannels in the attic yet, but get ready all the same.

Sprung Spring.

It's not over. We'll get another cool snap or two. Maybe a cold one. But a wee white butterfly is out on my front walk moving from pansy to pansy. It's in the sixties and we're nowhere near noon. As soon as I finish this cup of coffee I'm saddling the dog up and the two of us are pickuping out east to the Guilford County Prison Farm to buy us some Adirondack chairs for a very fair price. I called over there. They're open. The sheriff's deputy I got on the phone sounded like it was spring on his end of the line, too. Sounded like he could maybe do with a half-hour or so where he could sit in a chair and set his sheriff's deputy hat on the table beside him, big old tall sweating glass of ice water next to that. That is what he sounded like.

Weekend Weather.

Several cups of coffee later, my pretties, and the snow's all but melted and we're headed for sixty-six today, and—oh dear sweet baby Jesus in a zip-up rayon tracksuit—seventy six and sun for Saturday and Sunday. Those are near-record temps for the date, of course, but let's us not worry our little heads about our carbon footprints: Let's us pick out which porch to spend the weekend on, instead.

In Broken Glasses News, mine are, which means I come to you this morning live and in sunglasses, of the Rx variety, as I have been since midday yesterday. Taught my workshop in 'em. That'll instill confidence in the power of, say, filtering experience through the lens of one's main character. But Greensboro's the kind of town where if you phone around bright and early mewling and puking and beg and call people sir and ma'am and explain the nature of your emergency (which is that either you can conduct your fancy Friday-night-on-campus-deans-in-the-room-parents-weekend-honors-open-house thing in sunglasses, or they [the optometrists] can save your ass), you can have delivered unto your poorly insured self a reasonably-priced eye exam. All this means that later on today I'll be sporting me some fancy new lookers. Hopefully I'll be able to see farther and blink with aplomb, a la the run-faster-and-jump-higher theory of new shoes from the Stride-Rite in the mall. Can I wear them home, mommy? Can I? Well, Boo, I'm sure you can, but the question is, may you?

We did like us some grammar way back when at 2717 Goodfellows Road. We also liked to call me Boo.

I so well remember the first pair of glasses: Don't remember what grade—either first or second—but what I remember is coming out of the doctor's office and seeing leaves. I had no idea you could see leaves in the trees from far away. Until then they'd been green blurs. That was a day.

I'm sorry I left you stranded on Wednesday and Thursday, weatherers. But you know how it was: You knew this was coming. You could tell. Even in your coats, you could smell it warming up. We just had to have those chilly interstitial days to get to these ones. As for today: Get thee outside. Stay there. Go see something. Doctor's orders.

Ten, One.

Half an inch. It's a bad guess, but I've got officials of both the Canadian and American Weatherazzi on my side. Try out a little rain-to-snow or snow-to-rain conversion on the Google and you'll see that there can be quite a debate about this, but that short of melting whatever fell in your wheelbarrow and then measuring that, there's damn little consensus. I didn't have anything turned upright but the rain gauge, and it got its little hat of snow early on, apparently, which leaves me with the old 10:1 in x degree range, which we were, so. Surely this offends the purer of the weather gods, but perhaps we've always worshipped at the altar of the coarser ones, anyway. That look like sleet to you? I dunno. Well, maybe. Hang on. Yep. That's how it sometimes goes here at ANYLF's Southeastern Winter Weather Festival of Halfassed Instrumentation and Recording Methodologies. We didn't ever promise anybody anything other than our best, which is sometimes about as good as this.

The five inches of snow, by the by, were an ANYLF record, though we've only been at this two winters.

They want nearly 75 for the weekend. We've gone from needing the St. Bernard with the barrel of brandy around its neck to needing whatever dog it is that brings you beers and limes. For now: It's, ah, cold as ice out there. It's willing to sacrifice our love. But things will get better. Just wait for the rescue dog.

Big Snow.

So, OK, then.


We got about five inches up here on the hill at 709, starting around nine or ten last night. It's a dry, small-flaked snow, powdery and crisp and really something to see here as March comes in. In the park, it looked a lot more like six or eight inches. Don't know if the snow blew its way down into that bowl of land or if it just really did snow more down there—300 yards from here—but whichever, it's deeper there than here.



No real idea precisely how much precip to record—sorry, friends and fans of exactitude—but the fancy equipment here at ANYLF Spring Snow Headquarters got jammed:


This is kind of like when the anemometer gets blown off Mt. Washington. Don't be too terribly alarmed: We've got interns checking the PTI data and also checking the snow-to-rain conversion rates, and we'll have something shortly, I imagine. For now:


So. OK. Here at the brand-new WeatherCenter, it goes like this: We're melting off in the sun, and it'll be in the sixties by the end of the week. The streets look to be in good shape, but if it were my caution to exercise, that's what I'd be doing. Supposed to be 13 tonight. Basement's flooding every few hours from the big rain yesterday and whatever snowmelt situation is ongoing. There's probably water in the outbuilding, but there was water between the big house and the little house yesterday, which made exploratory missions inadviseable, and there wasn't/isn't anything I could do about it regardless, and a pretty comprehensive reno looms on that little shed's horizon, anyway, so we'll leave all that for now unexplored. What matters: It snowed, it snowed. Unto us a snow day is given. That, and some bookshelves. They're done. It snowed, and the books are out of their boxes. Those two things right there are two good things.

It's Happening.

Some. Don't get excited. Do your homework. But check out the window every little while or so. Maybe think about where those boots you bought in Boston might be.

March Snow?

And I'm only asking because I can't quite believe it, because even as the NOAA fancies promise it to us, and even as a quick check out the back shows ice on the trees, and a quick moment on the front porch says the sound of the raindrops hitting the ground has changed since this morning, has become something fatter, heavier, I just cannot quite say for sure that I believe in my heart of hearts we are going to have delivered unto us three to seven inches of snow by tomorrow morning.

To recap: I sat on the porch with the dog Thursday afternoon awaiting our houseguests. I wore shirtsleeves. We all of us had breakfast Friday morning on the table out back. It is going to be 68 next Saturday. Right now, though, it is just a hair over 32 degrees and it is pouring and it has been all day and it has been working itself up to this since give or take midday Friday when it just sort of started to cool off and friends and fans of weather I swear to you it smells and feels like snow and ice out there and there are icicles on the back deck railing and the radar is full from corner to corner and yet even with all of that I still cannot quite drag myself into the place of belief.

Everybody who's anybody is saying it's going to happen. Keep it here at ANYLF, though. We're not saying it's going to happen. All we're doing is hoping and trying to turn all the lucky trinkets lucky-side-up. But if and when it does happen, we'll perhaps have maybe one or two more things to say about it. So. Etcetera.

Either way, this is some weather.