It's been an unseasonably warm winter thus far, unless of course you live in Denver or somewhere else where it isn't, you know, unseasonably warm.  People's bulbs are coming up and flowering trees have begun to bud, most unwisely, like adolescent girls in love.  They'll have a bad end, but you have to smile at the enthusiasm, the hope, the brief and fleeting beauty of it all.

I don't mind the warm weather.  When I think about it (and I only just did so tonight, as the cold rushes back and deepens), I don't think I've ever had a truly unhappy moment at the beach.  Even my parents, who were as ill-matched as cherry blossoms and January, were happy at the shore.  I don't know what it is about surf fishing and sand castles, but somehow they prevented the screaming fights my sister and I endured back within the walls only a quarter-mile away.  Once, our car got stuck in the sand (I didn't grow up in a fancy town with actual beach parking lots) and my mother bet my father she could get it out without his help.  He took the bet; she sent him and us out of sight and had a car full of guys stopped within two minutes.  (My mother was a beautiful woman in the sunlight.) They pushed our car out.  It was all kind of Claudette Colbert in some movie where she got help by pulling up her skirt.  It was young, innocent, laughter.

I don't mind warm weather.