Unseasonable Season.

More on this tomorrow, friends and fans of weather, but since I've been away, I wanted to let you know: the days have been a string of beauty, chilly enough from time to time for a little fire out back, April continuing along March's line, fine by me since March was May. We warmed into the end of the week here, hit eighty today, and now we're seeing what they've been calling for, though it's been hard to believe—big electrical storm in the seven o'clock hour and now it's cooling, cooling, headed for a forecast high tomorrow below sixty, below what the temp is out there now. A high in the fifties. On April 22nd. With rain, they say. Do we eat chili one last time? Drink red wine while it simmers? These are fine questions for a Saturday evening. Think I'll maybe add one icecube here and mull it all over.

Potential Significance.

It's a busy radar out there, folks, and a forecast 20-degree falloff -- I like it in the way I like all weather but August's, in that something's up. In August we bake and hold. In most other seasons we shift and slide. I like the shift and slide. Grass seed in the lawn, windows pinned up where they need pinning: This is April the way we want it. We'll warm again through the end of the week, and the fancies are warning of something serious for the weekend. A 'potentially significant storm system,' is what they were saying this afternoon. Very well. We'll try to make ready. Beer and coffee. Clean the gutters. Prepare thyself. Get that seed rooted. It could be washed away.

Happy Days.

Here we go: aimed solidly for eighty degrees, and the wind just picked up a touch of that warmth after a long morning of carrying cooler-than-expected temps through these windows. The mosquitoes are trying to set in. Still, last night, eating hotdogs with the boy on the back deck, a half-sized beer in my hand and a full-sized sippy cup of milk in his, things were good. Calm. Pretty. The lawn was mowed. We'd been playing in it. Enjoy this, I told him. Hold on. Right now it's fun that it's summer. In June, when it finally is summer and we've all turned homicidal, we'll want to remember these days when we were happy.

Home Opener.

The Braves have won four after losing four. Eight games in and we're as average as can be, but looking better. Baseball's on the radio. Cookout in the back yard tonight: first mosquitos, 8 oz. can beers, chicken in store-brand italian dressing—gently charred and dressed up on sandwiches with avocado, crisped prosciutto, roasted peppers, the season's first Vidalias. Fancy lowbrow. Huge storms in the center of the country. Desperate warming tranquility here. The eighties are coming. Back. Windows open. The kid in the yard hollering, running. Finding everything again. The mint in, in full. One last icecube. Bats. I've been away, Weatherheads, but our weather has been holding steady, no new news, one last shot of spring before we return to apocalypse. Too often these entries become laundry lists. Too often that's all I know to say. It's nice to be back at this, though, still nice, a kind and gentle thing, a little lonely prayer I still know all the words to. Warmer tomorrow. Warmer still the day after that. Then we drop back some, try to remember. Maybe a bit of rain. Maybe some thunder.

April Warning.

Could it really freeze? This far into April? After the March we had? I'll tell you this, Weatherheads: I'll trade the tulips I have right now, and even the foot-tall gladiolas, for something that knocks the coming mosquitapocalypse back a week or two. We've been living in this blessed hinterland of bugless days for far too long already, borrowed time, etcetera, amen—but leave all that, OK? This means fires, real fires, in the woodstove, one last time. Maybe even hats. Again I say unto you, believers: It always gets cold in April. I had given up hope. I am not saying I have hope again. I am only saying it may freeze. I am only saying this is the weather I remember. The altar at which I worship. House finches have nested in the ferns. If you aren't worried about the house finches, worried they'll freeze, then you might as well not have house finches at all. What is the nesting season without freeze? Oh, and the ferns? Fret not. They can take it. Hell, they can take house finches. Watch the skies, friends and fans of weather. Watch the mercury.

Easter Weekend.

There was a frost advisory overnight, though I don't think we saw any of that here in the big city. That was for the country mice. No matter: I sit here in an empty house, the Toad and AMR gone for the weekend so I can make yet one more push on this book, and I'm sipping the first cup of coffee and waiting for the fire to take good hold outside. The shed's chilly. Beautifully so. This is that April chill I'd become so certain we'd never see again. Maybe we're righting the ship here on the Piedmont.

I've always thought a sunrise service ought to be a complicated thing to dress for. I've not always thought about such a thing the way I do now, which is to say that I'm no longer much of a service attendee, sunrise or no, but this time of year does ring the bells of memory a little bit, reminds one at the very least of the importance of ritual. It always gets cold here in April. Always. Only I thought it had quit. So nice to see it back again, same as always. So nice to be reminded that belief gets simpler and more complicated with every passing year.

Low Sixties.

What gift is this? Can it really be 61 and sunny on the heels of five(ish) weeks of heat? Did we just trade, straight out, March for April, and no one said anything? And Opening Day, to boot. I remember other cold April ballgames in this town, rainy ones, and my other commitments tonight make me so sad I can't huddle up downtown with an overpriced beer and a flannel I've dug back out to watch the Bats do whatever it is they do. In the rain. Check that radar, friends and fans of weather. Rain coming. As if this day couldn't get any better. The weather's so good that I almost don't mind that I have to go to the puppet show. On sabbatical. Almost. Maybe the windows down on the ride in will help. Maybe. Still: 61. It's clouded over since I started these sentences. No matter. 61.

Fool April.

A hailstorm, out of nowhere, welcomed April in around midnight Saturday night—and we've been pretty since, and we're pretty now, in the midst of an evening thunderstorm, gentle but for the dog afeared of the thunder. The ferns are off their hooks and out in the front walk getting unthirstied. The way the dog's shaking says it's about to rain harder, and so does the radar, but don't trust the radar after dark. Trust only the dog. And she's 104, so her instruments are, shall we say, less finely tuned, but then here comes the rain—

Termites in the writing shed, which I'm saying is a good thing, on balance—that building needed a bug person with a bug truck to come out and do bug things on a regular basis, and now it has to happen. And it's not a million termites, at least not yet. It's ten. So far there have been ten. I'm not hoping there are only ten, but it could have been a million.

That's April. I'm your fool. Until next time, Weatherheads.