Leap Dreams.

Dream from two nights ago: a five-story grocery store, with escalators, and Phil Collins on endless loop. On one floor: all dairy.

Dream from last night: a four-story used bookstore and no music, but a seriously intricate interstate system directly next to the bookstore which I had to use to (a) change levels and (b) take the Toad to visit my parents and my cousin, who each lived in different hotels in the bookstore, but at different exits off the interstate.

All my dreams used to be celebrity mashups (see: Sean Connery and Stevie Wonder in a pistol duel in a cul-de-sac; Alan Alda picking nits from my fur). Then, for a period of many years, they were epic adventure chases taking place in massive eat-play-live complexes. Perhaps now I'm moving on to split-level single-purpose retail.

In weather (because why else continue?): Big, big tornadoes back west, so keep an eye on what looks increasingly windy and iffy and roiled out there in 2740X -- we're more than warm enough to spin something into a branches-down thunderstorm, if not worse. The fancies seem to say our big threat will be overnight, but I think maybe don't go anywhere, whether to bed or just to the grocery, however many levels it may have, without having a quick look at the radar. Or the sky. If it's February, friends and fans of the reconfigured USDA hardiness zones, it must mean springtime tornadoes. So what if it's only February on a technicality. It's still February.

Flesh Wound.

Well, in advance of what could be one of the last half-cold snaps late this weekend and into next, in between the space breaks this morning I camp-axed some red oak into pencils for kindling, and in so doing sent a tiny smithereen into my right bird-giving finger, which, since I am a hunt-and-pecker, is also, as it turns out, my dominant o-p-k-l-j-i-m-n-y finger, among other prominent letters. Damn you, high school self, for half-assing typing. But thanks, middle-school and high-school self, self-appointed surgeon to the younger twin brothers, flamer of needles, digger-outer of splinters. A difficult typing afternoon, friends and fans of the just-resucitated novel, has been maybe ameliorated by the sewing needle and the tweezers.

My finger still hurts, I told AMR. Do you want to do something about it? she asked. And so I did.

Why have a blog if not to report the shockingly, aggressively mundane? In other news, Eric Chilton's kid goes to my kid's preschool, it snapped warm today, it'll rain and snap warmer tomorrow, and warmer still on Thursday. The lawns green. The Toad uses verbs. The novel's not dead. I also use that finger for punctuation. I surgered it (sure it's a word) right before I sat down here, and already it feels better. Long-lost Weatherheads of the interwebs, I tell you this: tomorrow is a free day. A leap day. The moon keeps hanging itself into the western evening sky alongside Venus and Jupiter in a way that makes one want to say something about it. We are warmer and warmer. We have not passed out of kindling season. We may not need kindling for days.

Spring Storm.

The above is a current-temp snapshot from 4 pm Friday, one way to look at the storm that blew through and landed us two beautiful crisp days and now this one, a low drizzly slog in the forties. Today's a Guilford County teacher workday, sadly and not sadly, meaning no preschool, and so no work in the shed, but also meaning a reasonably lovely Toadbound morning first at the Children's Museum (airplane, slide, fear of fire and mail trucks) and then at the little downtown pub that tries so hard. I want it to be slightly better, the pub, but I also partly want it to be a half-mile walk from some tube stop in out-of-the-way London, which makes me a simpering asswipe, so perhaps I should just shut up and be thankful. And they make a fine soup. Actually, more than one. As for the Friday storm, in case you missed it: beautiful, all the wind in the world, many untethered items blown around the front and back yard, a very thin line of storms at suppertime and then sun again, and those plummeting temperatures. Yes, it was thirty degrees colder in Jefferson than in Greensboro at 4. Yes, it was thirty degrees colder in Greensboro by nightfall.

They want to give us spring back, friends and fans of weather, beginning tomorrow. I've seen Japanese magnolias starting to bloom here and there. The daffodils may already be past peak. All of this is weeks and weeks early. Still, Friday, when it was so warm, when I had the double doors thrown wide open in the shed, when every now and then (and finally, finally) the sentences weren't like bloodletting, and when that good breeze blew, I felt ready. It's one thing to have a warm December and January, which we did. It's unearned, among other things. It's quasiapocalyptic. It's another, though, to make it to late February and have it snap springlike again. By then—by now—you start to feel a little readier. Maybe you shouldn't, but you do.

Local Forecast.

And it did storm—can I off the top of my head remember a February thunderstorm?—through midnight, big wind, big rain, not for long, but still. Enough to make you pine for the weather even as it was ongoing, if you were the sort to do such a thing, which etcetera, and so, internet, hello, the weather returns. That which you least need—yesterday's forecast for the 2740X—returns. What else do you require for now? I still need my sea legs back, so I'll report only this for this evening: It was warm enough tonight to think that burgers on the grill might be a good idea, and it was. Or they were. The Toad's window upstairs is open an inch or two. He's dead asleep. It's February. We ate as a family. We're a damn sitcom. Tonight, on a very special episode of ANYLF, burgers. Fake spring. Cooler over the weekend. Keep it tuned here. Good night and good luck, Mrs. Whoever-you-are, wherever you are. Wind, they say. So watch for that.

It's Storming.

It's late February. We had no real winter. The dog's freaked because a line of storms seems to be coming through. It rumbled out there a minute ago. I'm back. I thought I was done, but I'm back.

Another Shift.

These last two days, my god, the dry air, the wind, the leaves coming down hard all through the neighborhood—we're in Thanksgiving Fall now, that post-bright tail end of the season, when even soaking rains don't really do much to shift the notion that it's dry, when warm days like this one don't slow the idea that it'd be best to get the bulbs in the ground, bank the mulch around the newer plants, generally and as always make ready. We've got the windows open in the house, and down here in the swampish corner of the yard I've got the double doors thrown wide on the shed, the foolish expense of them once more worth it. I make it to this little weather blog less and less these days, but perhaps that's OK: yesterday, in the time I would have written about the temperature and the whatever this is piling up and about to come through, I instead raked leaves with the Toad, laid in the yard, tried in vain to make the wonderful emptiness of a late Sunday morning last. No use. Here it is Monday. The week cranks itself again. Still. Do things seem OK? Is there the sense we may make it? The deep freeze in the basement is slowly stocking itself for the winter, full of chili and soup and chicken quarters. I've got two flats of pansies in the truck bed wanting some attention. Maybe I'll start writing again. Maybe. First: tack the notes from the last draft up to the unpainted wall. Then see what happens. Then see where we are.

So many windows in this little building that with them all open like this the thing feels like a screen porch.

Fifteen-year-old-dog and a seventeen-month-old boy. I'm feeling overfull these last 48 hours or so. Sentimental. Too many adjectives. Too much blunt good weather to get out of the way. Can't help it. Don't know when I'll be back here. The weather won't hold like this forever. They want a freeze by end-of-week. Hell, I'll take that, too. I've got a new woodshed, this year's half-cord stacked neatly into it. I've got coffee.

November. To those of you for whom this is the first you've been able to truly recognize: this is sometimes what it looks like.

Not Enough.

Forgive me, but even happily booted and flanneled and even with the Toad in a hoodie and me in a hat, I still felt like the walk to school smelled like spring. Something green's on the air. Possibilities: We're in for one last (or next-to-last) round of something blooming, the overseeded lawns are coming in, the leaves just now piling in the gutters are in the sweeter stage of rot—or maybe this is fall, and I just don't remember. How much more human I've been feeling this time through, with the Toad at sixteen months, than I did last year, even though this time last year was the time I thought I was settling in, finally, the time I thought I might in some small way like the child.

I did not yet like the child. Now I like him plenty. Plenty.

And he's found the moon, says 'luna' every time he sees the sky, day or night, luna or no. Looks for stars up there, looks for them everywhere else, too, finds them hanging from front porches, sees them on t-shirt logos, in the way reflected light slides across the kitchen ceiling. Giggle giggle, he says. Twinkle twinkle.

It's cool in the shade still, but warming in the sun. The maples are about fully turned, and the pin oaks are throwing their fingers of leaves down everywhere here to the park. I'd say we're still more green than anything else, but we're moving hard toward peak season here on the flats. The colors are muted this year. That either means a lot of rain or not enough. The gauge has been cracked since late last winter, so we're going to have to content ourselves with not knowing for sure, though an easy guess says not enough. The easy guess is always not enough, isn't it?

Off-season discount strawberries over there on the kitchen counter. Pot of coffee half-full. Midmorning breakfast. Stack of bills and paperwork. The Toad at school in his train overalls. An ache in my left knee. This is the last of October, friends and fans of weather. Don't miss it. Take note. Remember for next year.

Cool Down.

We went to the mountains and brought back a truer autumn. Here is how it happened: Saturday morning we leave the shirtsleeved cabin—maybe I exaggerate, but it wasn't anything like chilly—and drive the dog and the Toad to the top of the state park up there in 24363. Down where we were staying it was surely upper fifties, maybe low sixties. Top of the mountain it was mid-forties with a forty-mile-an-hour wind. The Toad squinted into the wind, teared up, had questions. The dog lit out for Katahdin or Springer, one. I was ready to follow. AMR said settle down, said get back in the car, said we can stay, but we can't stay here.

We hiked it the next day in a slightly lesser wind and with maybe ten or twelve extra degrees.

And now, burnt offerings sufficiently offered, we've survived the drive back down into the Piedmont, back into our lives, back into another season, and then another. Monday afternoon saw eighty October degrees home in 2740X, but Tuesday and Wednesday brought a not-quite chilly rain, and where we land, finally, is here, Friday morning, leafblowers buzzing on both sides of the shed and a fire in the woodstove, the call to the firewood dudes on the to-do, a colder overnight here than any we saw up there. Actual hat weather, if not hat-and-coat. A bigger pot of coffee. The heat kicked on in the house as a nod to AMR. And the Toad. And the dog, not yet fully possessed of her winter coat and curled into a spot the size of a dinner plate on the sofa. And, hell, me, I guess, though if I lived alone I'd be toughing it out, trying to prove something—but to who? Or whom?

It's a dusty fall we're having thus far, none of the electric colors you'd hope for, if you were foolish enough to hope. But it is still and now fall all the same, leaves in the gutters, on the roofs. Time to switch modes, make ready in new ways. Time to bring out my grandfather's old rake. Hey, October. Hey, little fire. Hey, boots and flannel. Hey, jacket with the windows down on the way into work. Always one more thing to prove.