Fault Line.

When is it that it shifts? Forever, you listen to the monitor, and when he cries, you think: Motherfucker. Go back to sleep. Do not wake up. Do not, do not. And then he does wake up, and you loathe him, and you seethe and boil and chew and bite and then you get him down and then you go back to whatever you think your life is, which is some manner of shell game one way or the other, and etcetera.

What the books do not mention is that for your ilk—the reluctant, the regretful, the where-the-hell-is-my-ex-life crowd—for your ilk, somehow, in spite of your best efforts, the kid may win you over—in part, OK? let's not make this some kind of Rudy of the babies—want another dash? I got 'em cheap over here at the forecast—where were we?—oh, hell, it comes to this: Now the Toad cries out in his goddamn sleep and my heart hurts because the kid is sad, for fuck's sake, and he's in there, and we're down here, and sure, he went back down right away, but he's got a cold, and he's a little off, and can't somebody just bring him the green stuffed corduroy dog, at least, so he knows he's not on the planet alone?

The Bradford pears are about to go. The woodpile is shrinking. Those early plums, or whatever they are, are blooming. These are the deep pink landscape-company trees, the ones at groceries and schools. We've got AMR's congratulatory tulips here on the kitchen table. We've got ants in through the back door, the surest sign there is that the planet tilts again, like always. I send, I think, the book to the guy tomorrow. One of the guys, anyway. Guy the First. Door number one. I am sleep-fried. I keep dreaming of these enormous multi-use eat-sleep-play developments. With Jeff Goldblum playing the dude at the guardhouse. Or my highschool girlfriend (hey, SRE, wherever you are). Or AMR's ex-boyfriend as the buddy in the buddy system on the tour bus, and the buddy system somehow involves maraschino cherries and that one girl from band (not the girlfriend, another girl) who played the something and who now has a kid, who (the kid) had a cold in the dream, and now the Toad has a cold, so there you are.

Chilly for a time. Storms on the weekend. The forecast is a little sporadic, but we are still live on the scene, OK? We are making an argument.

It smells like green out there. I'm just saying.

Mile Markers.

The light's changed. We're greener out there, and yellower. We've maybe come out of (the temperature now or next week notwithstanding) that flat winter white. The trees are budded out, the maples are blooming, we suddenly have several hundred more birds in the yard—those waxwings cleared on and out to wherever waxwings go, and in their wake the neighborhood is full of other songbirds, of wrens, of robins, of whatever all else settles in here for the season, hangs on for the summer.

About time to go to the prison farm to buy ferns for the house finches.

We were chilly today, though not too cool to take the Toad and the dog out to the back porch for an evening sit down. They do love themselves some breezes. We're supposed to see sixties tomorrow, and then we temper things some, remind ourselves that the cherry trees haven't even bloomed yet, that the dogwoods are close but not yet there, that there's no color yet in those azalea buds. It always gets cold again, people. Often enough it rains and hangs onto it for a week or more. Baseball is cold well into April. We are getting closer. We are. But we have things to do first.

Frontal Boundary.

This is spring: the loud sound of the train through last night's open kitchen windows, so loud I thought it would wake the Toad. It did not wake the Toad. See also: gentle rain to shut the day down yesterday; the front porch and a cold beer; the dog long and panting and stretched just out of the Toad's reach, or mine. See also: daffodils blooming in the back yard. And crocus. See the new bird feeders strung from the maple. See the double doors opened wide all morning back there in RevisionLand. See also, ah, this:


Friends and fans of weather, boys and girls of all ages, the fancies have not yet dropped a watch box on us, but they are about to. What they are already advising about are the 45 mph winds we should be looking for before these storms even get here. When they do arrive, we may see 60 mph winds. Then what—an easy inch of rain, maybe two or three? This is tie-down-your-tarps weather, people. This is a cold front. The next time you're wondering what a cold front might be, see also this. See the temps in the mid-seventies right now, and see that woodstove cranking hard tomorrow morning.

So much wind already that I'm glad we're not leafed out yet (though the willows, always the first, have started). If this had come through a month from now, we'd already have trees down. And it hasn't even come through yet. Shut the windows. Nap the babies. Get ready.

Spring Rain.

Two days' worth. This'll bloom the flowers. Cold and not cold all at once. Beautiful. It hadn't rained in a while—not real rain, anyway. I'd forgotten. We'll leave the small matter of a couple of tablespoons of water leaking past the edge of the shed chimney for another time. For now, coffee and rain. Coffee and storm, even. Beautiful.

Forty Degrees.

See? Make a big deal of it and this is what you get: Leaden overcast to open the day, leaden overcast to shut it back down again. When the sun was out earlier there was maybe some hint of hope, but also it was so cold—comparatively, anyway—that it didn't matter, and standing in the wind tunnel of a parking lot over at the smaller Harris Teeter all one wanted was to get back home, try for the afternoon nap, hope for some writing time inside that nap.

Toad nap duration: Thirty-three minutes. Pages revised: Two. Forecast mood: Leaden.

If I hadn't known better I'd have said this morning's sky looked like snow.

Successes, however small: We have olive oil, which I bought at Olive Oil Depot. I have new line-marking pens, which I bought at Ink Pen Depot. I have eaten a banana. That was already in the house, so I cannot attest to the depoted provenance of same. I'm trying the Toad for a second afternoon nap, as the first one was a joke. That endeavor, though it's not yet succeeding, has also not quite yet failed.

Looking ahead? Aren't we all? Tomorrow: Chilly and Januaryish. Thursday: Tornadoes? Ah, spring. Or whatever this is. And there's the sun back out, however briefly. Maybe it just slipped beneath the clouds off to the west. This is both seasons concurrently. This is the bluejays building nests, the squirrels trying to get back into the building, the daffodils showing color, the woodpile looking meager. This is all the clothes all the time. This weather is for both bad beer and good beer. If the Toad doesn't end up napping, I'll be aiming at each of those.

Seventy Degrees.

I missed Friday's seventy degrees, but no worries: Here they are again, a windows-down-in-the-truck kind of day, a day so fine that even on top of flu shots the Toad rode the center of the bench seat all the way out to the doctor hollering and happy, and all the way home in a kind of sunsmacked stupor, resulting in the first documented instance of Toad sleep in the pickup. In other news, trees bloom in the Harris Teeter parking lot. Buds everywhere else, on everything else. And it makes sense, I guess: I missed most of February, somehow, or it slunk away under cover of night, but things bloom in these parts right around my spring break, which has been for ten years right around March 17th, so get ready. Threeish weeks. Daffodils will probably pop before February is up, at this pace. And the fancies have scaled our forecast up out of the fifties and into the sixties for the week. When we move, we move. Remember winter? Wasn't it last week? It was colder in the shed than out of it this morning. Get them windows up and open, please and thank you. Swing wide the double doors.

What else is in the forecast? Frantic revision. Line editing. Making clean and crisp that which is not. Sending soon to NYC. One big game of chicken. Holy hell.

I'll tell you what's simpler: the weather. A beer on the porch. The Toad sitting out there, delighting in the cars running back and forth. The dog overseeing the proceedings. Things are greening damn near daily. A woodpecker wanted into the shed this morning. I ran him off. Noisy fucker. I'd tell you more, but I'd have to sit inside to do it.

Western Expansion.

Good evening, Fort Collins, Colorado. Many thanks to you and yours for the blazing big sky, the temps solidly in the 50s, and all the wind there is. I guess when the landscape runs flat for three million miles and then out of that comes a Rocky Mountain without a hell of a lot of warning, why then, you get wind. Wind warnings on the interstate north out of Denver. Actual tumbleweeds. Additional wind. And this isn't that windy, say the locals.

So, so strange, the age of the jetliner.

The forecast returns to the Gate City tomorrow night, and what I hear is that tomorrow will be seventy degrees and trying for eighty, a day not to be missed—unless, perhaps, you can stand in the shadow of the Rockies and think about just how far away you are from everything else, just how wee you are, just how much those folks riding west out of St. Louis must not have been able to believe it when these things popped up on the horizon however many days—days—before they got to them. And it'll be 70 again in 2740Xland, right? Right. But somebody take a picture of it for me, would you? Put it in a Mason jar and save me some. In the meantime, I've just discovered fresh-ground coffee in the hotel room, which means if I can survive the night—an MFA reading and the postgame that arrives with same—that all will be well and good come tomorrow.

I do love it out here. All the largeness. I realized I'd missed it from the last time I came west. But it makes me miss home.

New Draft.

Just because I did not manage to speak to you of things weather yesterday does not mean that there was none: It was straightforwardly late winter out there, a breeze, a chilly morning, a fire in the shed well into the afternoon. There was, as there is this morning, an underlying warmth, even in the thirties. There was not what we're seeing now, though, which is a truly lovely skate of high strange clouds through the southern sky. We look like another town entirely out there this morning, a town closer to a larger body of water. We do not look landlocked and featureless. And forget all about late winter for the next five days, friends and fans of the sudden change of season. Your Gate City highs for the next five days look like this, say your tax dollars at meteorological work: 60, 65, 73, 65, 62. Something's going to bloom early and get crushed on March 10th. You heard it here first.

For the first time in a very long time the Toad at school does not mean a fire in the stove, a slow bleed of words. Instead, magically, impossibly, it means a trip to whatever Kinko's is called now to have the thing copied twice or thrice and bound all pretty and in the lucky style so that there might be by god and by hand line editing, so that we might see if indeed the new thing is the new thing, so that we might just send the fucker off to the big boys in Gotham to see what they think, to see if they want to take another ill-advised chance on another three hundred pages of mayhem and foolishness and underskilled kissing. Surely we'll have to get someone involved to teach me to end a sentence. Surely we'll need some of these comma clauses surgically removed.

There is a yellow Camaro in it. There are also boats. And parachutes.

Copy store, gas station, grocery store, copy store, home. Maybe the ink pen store, too. Then Toad needs. Then more Toad needs. That is one way to have a day.