DIARY
Let’s just start with this: last Friday I came home from work, ate a quick dinner, and mowed the yard. Saturday night it snowed.
That, in a nutshell, is so many things: March in North Carolina. Par for the course. Life right now. Friday I mowed the grass, taking care to bag the clippings and empty them into the heavy-duty trash can I keep for yard waste, taking time to stripe the grass diagonally on the opposite angle from when I did it the weekend before, and there was a chill in the air as the sun set, the kind that felt more like October, like football and bonfires and the awakening of some adolescent excitement than the warmer urges of spring.
Saturday it snowed, a bone-chilling, damp, cured-only-by-hearty-stew cold snow, one that fell remorselessly after a concert we’d put on at the college, one that celebrated the life of a man who directed the community music program until several years ago, one who seemed cut from the cloth of local legends, the kind of fellow who could tell a soprano what to sing and she decided he was right. Anyway we’d sat through two hours of tributary music, really good music at that, a fantastic showing for our post-industrial town of about 35,000, and then it was over, and we threw open the doors to the 110-year old hall, and discovered the mulch beds and tulips and daffodils were filling up with sleet.
The ladies groaned, and the men turned their collars up against the cold, and a lucky few reappeared with umbrellas plucked from some previously hidden place. I went back inside to hob-knob a while longer, thinking maybe what I’d just witnessed outside was a misconception, that if I chatted some more it would simply go away.
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