Historically Average.

We made it, we made it, we made it, we made it. If you live elsewhere — if you live outside our Plagues of Egypt drought — then you maybe don't get so excited over a last-day-of-the-month soaker like we got treated to today. Cover the kids' ears: It is still fucking raining. Give or take, it's been raining since Friday. I remember this used to happen. Before. I remember this. But who cares who remembers what? Here's tonight's top story: We have exceeded, by a smidge, our monthly historical average. We missed in January by two inches. Over twelve months we're something like fifteen or twenty inches down. But we had March, friends and fans of weather. It rained this month. Remember?

And it was a beautiful rain, like a chilly version of the edge of a tropical storm, periods of serious rain and periods of drizzle. And from that kind of a direction, too, little bursts of energy up out of the south and, give or take, from the Atlantic. A gift. A strangeness visited upon the land. Now, people. Now is the time for the fatted calf.

Oh: Yesterday was the Presidential Opener. I had it half wrong. It was Opening Day yesterday, but today, beautifully, is Opening Day, too. Right now the Los Angeleses are visiting the Minnesotas on my TV. My grandmother refers to sports teams that way. The Dallases. Last night the Atlantas got their hearts broken. Walk-off home run. But today it rained. All day. Almost half an inch. Tomorrow we start the monthly count all over again. We're still mired in a pretty good and serious and true drought. Not nearly enough has changed. But in one small way, we made it. We made it, we made it, we made it. And it is still raining.

Opening Day.

A moratorium on photographs for a day or two, I think. I wonder if I haven't been cultivating or recultivating a pretty healthy fear of the written word here, and in sticky places, just tossing up a photograph of a thistle. Not that I often have the fear in quite the way that many of my friends and colleagues do, which is to say, I don't often get paralyzed by the blank screen. I'm fortunate in that way. My paralysis — or, more accurately, my misfirings, my crossed nervous signals — arrive(s) in the fear that the few hundred words I can shove out no problem are just that, shoved out, a kind of highish-minded well-intentioned badly faux-literary version of the Jumble. Which in our newspapers growing up appeared next to the Family Circus. Remember the mother's haircut? I remember that.

Our weather: Cold. Even the Weather Channel says so. I think we'd even get 'Cold' or 'Cool' if it was January. Thick low gray clouds and showers. The birds out there sound confused. We're not supposed to freeze. Spring comes back this week. Except that this too is spring, if I'm remembering correctly, and I know I am: It's Opening Day. The Red Sox and the Athletics have already played two that count in Japan, but we are not for our purposes going to count that. We really shouldn't count tonight — the Reds play at 1 tomorrow, which is as it should be, and the game tonight is the only one on the schedule, as opposed to the fullish slate tomorrow — but since it's the Braves tonight, ANYLF is happy to throw out a, if not the, first pitch.

More than enough people have written poems to baseball (Malamud, Burns, DeLillo, to name a few), so this can't be that. This is instead what Opening Day has always felt like to me, which is a return to something very basic, if something can be very basic. As opposed to simply basic. Baseball season starts again. One of my favorite ways to go to church as the half-assed grownup I've half-become is to put on a late Wednesday night game I don't much care about, a West-coast American league game like the Royals at the Mariners, maybe, to set the set to mute and put on some music and pour a low drink and sit in the back room and watch some kid throw left-handed middle relief until I'm sleepy enough to go to bed. I don't require that this be anyone's pleasure but mine, and I try not to proselytize too much outside of the pat shopworn line I'll deliver to my classes tomorrow — baseball season's begun; all's right with the world — because of what an easy lie that is to tell. So little is right with the world, except that it's spring again, and much is blooming and greening over. It's this and only this: For someone like me, having a game on TV, especially a Braves game (I'm from Atlanta), helps with all that is wrong.

My dad, when I was seven and eight and nine and ten or so, took me to Opening Days at the old round sixties-era Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. More accurately, Home Openers, as the Braves were so bad then as to generally not merit being at home on Opening Day. They were better off as cannon fodder for the 1 pm Cincy game. And here, friends and fans of those old Braves teams (remember Claudell Washington? Glenn Hubbard? Gene Garber, whose son I played Little League with?) and of weather: It was always bitterly cold. It was April, it was Atlanta, and the temps would be falling down through the forties and into the thirties up there in the cheap seats. We'd bring my dad's old army blanket, drab green wool with the shiny drab sateen edging, huddle with our Cokes underneath that thing, talk about how cold it was. Younger years, we'd (gasp; heresy) leave by the seventh inning or so. But once I was old enough, we'd stay all the way through, me, yes, with my cap and glove, and him telling me to be ready, be ready, a foul ball might come our way. Only once in my life has a foul ball come my way, when I was twelve, in Nashville, at a brutally hot and humid Sounds game, and my grandmother, to save me, shoved me somehow under my seat. The ball hit the arm of my chair. I was an All-Star that year. I could have caught it. She bought my cousin (who would later preside over my marriage to AMR) and me ice creams in those miniature batting helmets to make it up to us.

Baseball means there's only six weeks left of school. It means summer's coming. It means soon enough my ex-landlord will be arriving unbidden on the WeatherDeck to kidnap me to go to Winston or Danville for minor-league games. It means I'll sometimes go to the Disneyfied stadium here in Greensboro, a sad, sad improvement on the crumbling War Memorial Stadium the Bats used to play in. They're not even called the Bats anymore. I can't bring myself to say their new name here. But if summer's coming, it means that a new project is surely looming out there somewhere, the whatever comes next after the novel that's not even finished. The second novel. I think there is a second novel. Which is bound to mean some difficult evenings, some rudderless days, a week or six where I'll feel so fortunate to find the Pirates playing late and way up the dial at the Padres, a 9-6 affair in the fifth inning, a child called up from the minors already, in June, coming on in relief. He's got a good curve, but his control isn't so hot. He's bouncing it up there every now and then.

Those are the players I love to watch. The guys batting .212, the pitchers who can't find the strike zone. It's a kind of basic struggle, on display for anyone who wants to look. It's not any more or less American than anything else, and though I'm maybe more likely than most to get caught up in that particular and peculiar brand of Opening Day flag-waving (baseball! America!), I try my best to love it only and merely for what it is: it's the return of something long and complicated and basically meaningless. It's a sure sign of summer on a day that really ought to be cold. Needs to be cold for it to feel right, and it is: It's 40 degrees here. Just started raining again. It's going to rain some more. Tonight, in D.C. (forecast: cloudy, 40), the Braves play at the Nationals. They should have (re)named that team the Senators, but they didn't. Flawed from the start.

The Braves always lost. We'd come home and my mom would want to know how it had gone, even though she'd watched the thing on TV and knew perfectly well. I always wanted to know if she'd seen us. She always said maybe she might have, that she might have seen us really, really quickly as the camera panned the crowd. She couldn't be sure, though.

Baseball's back. No photography today, please, flash or otherwise. Just watch the game.

Busted Forecast.

This — this set-in kind of weekend-long rain — was not in the cards. My understanding was that we were supposed to get showers and maybe a few storms yesterday, followed by a much cooler sunny day today. But we'll take this over here at ANYLF. If it rains a little more today, a little more tomorrow — if the QPF can be believed — we may make our monthly average. I'll give us a quarter-inch so far for today, which carries the monthly total to within a little less than a half-inch of what we'll need. This is exciting stuff. If ANYLF had a ticker to run across the bottom of the screen, that's what it would be about. That and, um, the tree, which has, I'm fairly sure, passed the halfway point, blooming-wise.


It's cold here. It's gray. It'll be colder and grayer tomorrow. Both. Maybe more than all else weather, I love the rain.


Finally, in Please Step Away From The Camera, Sir news, we're probably going to have to get an intern to take this thing away from me.

Classic Rock.

It turns out the weather comes every day.

Something's up with me lately, I think, something having to do with the large versus the small, and in terms of mental health, the small is often enough winning out. Current interests: The endless post-gaming of Tuesday night's poorly roasted potatoes; Phil next door cutting a 12"-by-12" hole in each end of an ancient fuel oil tank so DW Griffin Salvage will take the thing off his hands and thus somehow save him $150; things that bloom. I am a little too interested in things that bloom. Or bud. Or seed. We're all of us having spring. I myself am having it flower by flower.

There are big things out there: The novel, whatever comes after the novel, the university. Rest-of-one's-life kind of things. So I'm remedying all that by taking too-precious-by-half photographs of maple seeds. Whirlygigs, we called them growing up.


The new neighbor across the street — not Blue-Tick-Beagle Paul, but the other one, the one who sold Phil a nearly-brand-new Caddy (and as such, Phil is now tucking his shirt in when he leaves the house to drive that cream-colored bad boy), is at work on a kind of stem-to-stern reno of a house nearly identical to mine. New gutters. New floors. Today (he's a fancyass car dealer, brings a different awesomely rad car home every day) he's got a big Republican-white Beamer backed up to the front door, and he's blasting 92.3 The Wolf into the living room. You can look inside another world. You can talk to a pretty girl. She's everything you dream about. But don't fall in love. She's a beauty. She's one in a million girls. One in a million girls! Why would I lie? Now why would I lie?

When I was in high school, all I listened to was Z-93 and 96 Rock. When Layla would come on, my friend Chris Adams and I — he drove the same way home from school that I did — would pull over into some neighborhood and get out and stand by our cars with the windows rolled down and listen to Layla. I beg you darlin' please.

The weather, the weather, the weather. In today's forecast, we're looking for sunshine and maybe a few clouds, with a high right around eighty degrees. And folks, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a few pop-up thunderstorms this afternoon. It's almost a summertime pattern out there. We'll look for a low tonight in the upper forties, and there's a big cooldown coming for your weekend. Keep it tuned right here for the latest on that, and coming up at six, our picture of the week.

I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school. You told me something wrong, I know I listen too long, but then one thing leads to another. It's a girl my lord in a flatbed Ford.

We are, ah, in the middle of a rock block. For all I know, we may also be in the middle of a no-repeat work week. But we've covered this: for all I know, I do not know.

Ruth's Bush.

My neighbor, Phil, calls this plant — we have two of them, actually, both on the northwest corner of the house — Ruth's Bush. I used to know the real name of it. No longer. What I know is this: It's an early-spring bloomer, and it fragrances the whole yard. Ruth planted it. She lived here before the philandering airplane pilot and his praise-music recording wife. They lived here before I did. Before we did.

I had in mind writing a ton here today, recording all the vagaries surrounding the fireplace weather in Virginia, the gusts to 40 mph up on the western slope of Mount Rogers, the general and healthy reminder of what cold is. But it's pushing toward the mid-seventies here in 27408, with gusts of our own, though nothing like 40 mph, and the petals from the Japanese magnolia are raining down each time the wind picks up, and the thin high clouds we had for most of the morning are burning off, and even though I'm not at all sure shade counts as weather, the effect of the blown-open blooms on the tree out front is that the WeatherDeck is in a kind of dappled shady splendor, begging for me to take my Spring-Breaked self out there with Per Petterson's so-far excellent Out Stealing Horses, to take the dog out there with me, to sit and read and sit and read.

It is so good to go to Virginia. All of you should go. If you go, and if you're wearing the right clothes, you will feel like this:


But if when you return the weather is like it is today, you will have to go outside and sit and read. Today's weather report is strikingly similar to yesterday's. I know this. That is because today's weather is strikingly similar to yesterday's. Tomorrow, friends, I will endeavor to complain mightily about the likelihood that we will have another precipitation shortfall for March. Today — today I am going back outside.

Both Seasons.

Much more, friends and fans of weather, tomorrow, when such things as plans and pictures can be sorted. AMR and I decamped the premises (27408) for Grayson Highlands (24363) for a couple of days under the following theory: if it's going to be winter, it might as well be winter. KFW reports snow here in 27408 sometime in the intervening period, which I'm pretty damn sorry to have missed, but I can happily report buckets of flurries Monday night in 24363, enough to accumulate a little bit; in other news, Ron Cooper, he of the rented-by-us Cabin on the Ridge, reasonable rates, reported this morning that yesterday morning featured a low of 16 degrees down by his house, well downridge from Cabin on the Ridge. They're in a frosthole, he explained. We were not 16 degrees uphill, but we were cold. Delightfully so.

Back down out of Grayson this morning and south and east through Sparta and Yadkin and again into spring. Just a quick day and a half in the mountains. Back down in the flat now, where things by and large are green. So warm this afternoon we lost our heads and decided to mow the lawn and put hot dogs on the grill. Which is where we are now. More spring tomorrow.

For our more visual learners:


Grayson, above. Greensboro, below.


Had our first azalea open up while we were gone. Hey, spring and winter both. Hey, 27408. Good to go away, good to come back home.

Cold Tenth.

We're getting a little reminder this morning, a sort of don't-get-too-soft, don't-get-too-ready-for-June flag run up the pole: we're 36 degrees and genuinely chilly, gray and wet from a little early-morning rain, and we're headed maybe for a killing frost this evening. Items about which to worry: the leafed-out hydrangeas. The azalea up here by the WeatherDeck. Budded tulips. And the tree, always the tree— but I feel like we got the tree this year, and I don't want to get too greedy, so if 29 degrees takes out what's left of the petals, well, then, we got ours.


This is the sort of spring other, more regular places get, places like Franconia, Massachusetts, or some foggy damp Oregon town. Kansas. Places in Kansas get spring like this, don't they? A set-in cold day to remind you where you've come from. Down here on the Piedmont we have a tendency to relax too soon, to let a string of seven warm days become a kind of perfect sunny backyard golden calf. We let ourselves into April well before March is any kind of over. Which is reason enough to offer up a goat, actually, for a day like today: Here is another variety of spring, a kind which bears remembering, a kind that wants for you to drag that hooded sweatshirt out from the bottom drawer once more, perhaps. A kind that makes us just a little more kin to folks who have things like snowmelt. Whose flowering trees are only just now showing buds. Who never even put that sweatshirt back away in the first place.

It's cold. We got a tenth of an inch of rain. We may, if we're lucky, get a little bit more. Now put a hat on and get out there in it.

Official Spokescharacter.

Maybe Easter Sunday is to blame for my crazed affection for all things weather. We had around our house, first at Goodfellows Road and later at Brandon Ridge Drive (the latter a street, actually, in the woods made semi-famous in the odd, odd Mark Trail comic strip), all the regular Easter trappings: Easter basket, new Easter ties, Easter dinner with the good china and the silver and the etcetera. But at church — Holy Innocents' Episcopal — there was a white wooden cross drug out from somewhere on Easter Sunday which had chicken wire bounded within the wood and into which chicken wire the children of the congregation, at a set moment during the service, were to put flowers brought from home: daffodils, tulips, dogwood branches, seasonally depending. This was more Easter for me than anything else. My mother would keep a close eye on developments in the outside world, keeping keen track of the forecast, of her flowerbeds, looking always for what we boys might be able to bring to church for the chicken-wire cross. She may even have planted the garden specifically so that, no matter what, something would be blooming at the appointed time. I remember shining shocking Easter Sundays — weather like what we had yesterday here in 27408, a day so warm and overwhelmingly perfect that neither AMR or I could bring ourselves to do anything other than lie in the lawn all afternoon with the animals — and I remember sleety ones, too. Frozen ones. But I remember that regardless, whether we had snow or rain or heat or gloom of night, we always had flowers for the kiddie cattle call to the altar. I do not believe we once bought them at the store. My mother had some kind of agreement with the weather.

That Goodfellows Road yard, if I'm remembering right, had seven billion daffodils. I also remember a backyard expanse so large that comic strips should have been written about that acreage instead. A highlight: In center-left field, somehow just out in the middle of the grass, there was a tangle of thorns we called the Bye-bye Bed. Must have been two stories tall. At least. Hit a ball in there, and there would be no Easter Miracle to bring it back. No need even to wait vigil at the mouth of the cave. It would just be gone.

A quick spin through the internets, by the way, results in this little gem:

Elrod [ANYLF note: Jack Elrod drew/wrote Mark Trail] was honored in 1988 by President Reagan for his efforts to develop more pride in America. In addition to a Sunday page in which Mark Trail urged everyone to "reduce carelessness and abusive activity such as littering, vandalism and theft, and wildlife poaching," Elrod has also produced a variety of materials for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help teach schoolchildren respect for the environment. In addition, Mark Trail is now the official spokescharacter for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), making him the voice of the National Weather Service and NOAA Weather Radio.

Jesus seems a little something like a spokescharacter to me these days. He's in a damn lot of coloring books and comic strips, for starters.

On the way home from work Friday, there was out in the front yard of a church on Highway 70 what I think has to be the worst crucifixion reenactment I've ever seen: some nearly-naked high school kid wearing a bad long wig and up on a lumberyard cross, and a bunch of people standing around underneath him in what were clearly bedsheets and flip-flops. It was a beautiful day. Warm. Breezy. It was the kind of day to do what the handful of little kids who were there were doing: running around in street clothes (as opposed to crucifying clothes) and playing in the yard and in the little cemetery next door. It seemed a pretty bad day to be half-assedly crucifying people. Jesus had some Crayola-red paint on his chest. The soldiers and Jerusalemites both were standing around trying to remember how to look when you're supposed to look sad.

I don't probably want to get in the business of choosing churches, but I think I'll take instead a week of looking out the window, hoping like hell that the freeze won't take out your daffodils. I'll take, too, so long as we're here, what happens after you hit a towering shot out towards left, the tennis ball leaping off your metal bat championship-style, you knowing even in the moment right after you hit it where it's going to land, knowing what that's probably going to mean.