Out, Lamb.

Clouding over. Rain on the way. Warm, or warmish. Strange odd midspring. First azaleas about to bloom. Then we'll know for sure.

Light Seen.

First things first: it's chilly out, and partly to mostly cloudy. Should warm into the afternoon such that sitting out in the yard, whether at your home or at your work, might not be the worst idea you ever had.

Second things second, though: After a day warmer than we'd been told it would be, a better day than we could have wished for, a little slashing something whipped through at about 6 last night and spit on us for a while—the driveway didn't even get fully wet. You could still see dry driveway between the raindrops. But that's not what I'm telling you about. What I'm telling you about is what came next: At around seven, or a little later, the edge of that thing cleared east just far enough to let the sun set off the back side of it, and what resulted was this liquid golden light that even a nonbeliever like me would have to call sanctified, and you don't have to take my word for it: Up and down Walker Ave—I was piloting the ANYLFMobile down Walker Ave—people were coming out of their houses and places of business and leisure to photograph the light. A young woman came out of the Blind Tiger and took one shot facing east, into the golden sanctified light, and one shot facing west, into the blinding setting sun. Persons came out of their homes and stood on the sidewalks and took pictures on cell phones and actual cameras.

The light was like this: It made the leafless trees, whose bark is gray and brown by any other measure, turn gold. There are not really any other words besides gold for what this was. Golden and sanctified. And I have to say that I think not having leaves yet did something to the quality and the caliber of this light, kept it from being green, maybe, kept it gold. This was the kind of light where you'd want to contact your friends and neighbors and say, Hey, did you see the light? This was the kind of light where, later last night, after I returned thirty dollars lighter from my Walker Ave poker game, AMR, who does not always notice things such as the outside world, said, Did you see the light?

We'll use 'sanctified,' by the way, in a non-exclusive non-specifically-religious way. We'll use it in a Jesus-waving-flags-and-menorahs kind of way. A meteorological way, then.

Morning, Sunshine.

We did not get the storms they promised, but we did get a band of thunderless showers through here in the wee hours, bringing our storm total to more than an inch and a half, and taking us over six inches for the month. The smart money says we'll be delisted from the droughtometer when this week's numbers get released.

It is give or take 65 degrees and sunny and windy here on the WeatherPorch, and there's a warmth in the wind, and so if you were looking for a day you could call perfect, this would be damn near it, at least so far. I've got this feeling we'll cool off a bit through the afternoon, though, on our way into the low forties/upper thirties tonight. You don't get days like this for free.

The finches came through fine.

Little of any of that matters, though, friends and fans of the entirely astonishing, as much as the following furtively-taken by-me this-morning photograph of a house around the corner from ANYLF Global WeatherWatch HQ:


Dear sweet grown-up patriotic open-minded Jesus in the front yard, do I love this.

Small Preparations.

A confession: I really thought we'd wake up to a kind of mottled sunshine this morning, a respite from all this gray out in front of what the fancies are promising may be some toothy midnight storms. Instead, March continues apace, the sky back behind the white church steeple itself almost white. It was grayer earlier, when, I kid you not, The Human Race raced by 709, directly down the middle of our street. The Human Race had rainsuited paramedics on bicycles. The Human Race had tall skinny men spitting into the curbs. The Human Race had persons holding their sides in half-agony. Much later on, The Human Race had small children. The Human Race had tweens. Eventually, The Human Race had plump persons ambling past with soda bottles in their hands. Those humans were not so much racing as doing the bare minimum possible to earn their The Human Race long-sleeved t-shirts.

We're warm enough for storms. What's building down south, down in and around Georgia, looks pretty fierce. Already here at ANYLF we are considering ways we might better secure the ferns to their front porch hooks, so as to better secure the procreating finches held therein. One does not want storm-evicted finches. As far as your signs and omens go, that cannot be a great one. So: Maybe a bit of string or twine later on. I have to upset them anyway—the ferns need water. Might as well do what I can to tie them down at the same time. And this is what it comes to, friends and fans of the long suburban wash: We spend our afternoons knotting our songbirds more tightly to their perches. And better yet: We spend our mornings planning to.

Rain Redux.

Here's how it rains in 27401 these days: Rarely, but all at once. Or maybe this is how it rains everywhere, and how it always has. But these days of set-in rain feel unfamiliar somehow, feel out of place. What I remember of March: It finds ways to hold spring off one more day, one more week. Last year, a late hard cold snap. This year, these rains. We're warming, though: Today's rain is up from the south. Yesterday's was out of the west.

We're over five inches for the month, well and well past what we were owed. No sense complaining. Come August we'll have needed every bit of this. And more coming: Storms Saturday night into Sunday morning. Getting to be time, friends and fans of thunder and lightning, to start recalibrating— there's a whole new sky over here at 709. I knew where to look and how to listen over there at 1303. Don't really know much of anything over here, yet, except where the cardinal directions lie.

Heavy Fog.

Let's say it's 400 yards to the church steeple from where I'm sitting here at the kitchen table. Maybe it's only 300 yards. I'm not sure. There's another house, a street, and a gym between here and there. I've never been inside the gym, but it's pretty clear what kind it is: bleachers that roll out or accordion back into themselves along the walls, hoops that crank down from the ceiling. Metal supports for the roof just low enough to interfere with/make compelling a game of paddleball. Paddleball: a small canoe paddle sawed off and taped at the sawed-off handle, flat rubber bases about where baseball bases should go. Tennis ball. House rules, a la, if the ball hits the ceiling supports, it's either a ground-rule double or a live ball, depending. But I digress.

Low forties. Rain and drizzle all night. Fog so heavy still, at eleven o'clock in the morning, that I cannot quite make out the entirety of the steeple. New ways to think about the word muffled, too, when the clock in that thing chimes the hour. They say warmer weather tomorrow. A day like today makes it hard to believe it will ever be anything other than the way it is right now.

Noontime Oatmeal.

Because that's the sort of day we've drawn: Low, low clouds, temps in the forties, big rain coming. Two inches over the next five days, which will take us toward seven for the month. Added mandatory Greensboro caveat, from having been left short so many times: Or so they say. But that radar looks like even an armchair meteorologist could point at all the Doppler mess and say, Ah, Mabel? Probably best if one of us goes out and rolls up the windows on the Buick.

Dogwoods holding, holding, waiting for a run of sunny days in the sixties and seventies. Tulips holding, too, and the Japanese magnolias, and the damn near everything else. This has so far been a slow smolder of a spring, hints and fits and starts and a day or two where you think, I better stock the fridge with some cheap beer, and then a run of other days where you figure maybe it might be best not to get out of bed at all.

Head a mess this morning, sparked full of ideas and inertia all at the same time. Turned the heat on out back there in the writing shed. Now I'm just waiting for it to warm over out there. So to speak. Or so they say.

Warmer weather by the weekend. Chance of rain all the way through. Keep your boots by the door. Maybe keep one pair by the front door, another by the back. Best to be prepared.

Half-Ton.

The official ANYLF pickup: half-ton. Tonnage of compost brought back this noon from the TLK High Point Soil Extravaganza: .9 tons. For those of you scoring at home, that's .4 tons more than the truck is meant to carry. Or, ah, 800 pounds. Like ye olde gorilla. Driving home was like driving on ice: Put a ton of weight on a half-ton rear-wheel drive situation, particularly a situation where your front wheels are your steering wheels, and you'll find that the steering is no longer the first thing that comes to the situation's mind.

We warmed this afternoon to a true windows-down temperature. We cool right back off again the rest of the week, and we cloud over, too, just to keep in check those of us who thought winter might have come and gone, those of us who all afternoon planted daylilies and whatnot, those of us who've, oh, I don't know, overtonned our pickups of late, those of us who got all excited and brought home all that gorgeous black dirt.

Chilly weather coming. Rain and storms. One more chance—if not the last—to wear the winter hats. And it's good: there's inside work to be done. One needs to sit at the desk a while, and not just dig holes in the ground. One needs coffee and cold rain and revision. One needs to know clear and well what sort of asswipe that makes one sound like. Still: One will drink some coffee in the cold rain, OK? And one will not say one's sorry about it. Hey, pronouns.

Last late local conditions: Still warm. Train. Steeple visible from everywhere: The trees haven't leafed out yet. Which is exactly where we are: The trees have not yet leafed out.