With April came the sun spare the rain, because #climatechange. No longer the unicorn, an 80°F evening backlit the daffodils, spreading a delicious gold about the lawns that more than one household had forgotten they even planted. Neighbors peppered the sidewalks. An occasional game of chicken ensued as they looked down and you looked up, considering what one considers during what used to be characterized as unseasonable in the PNW. Seasons. Seasons were so 20th century, hold the fox.
    
Now, we take temperature in stride. Summer stashes of shorty short shorts flung about the bedroom of one’s life. Always the question of that favorite tank top, the one with the bird and stretch. A ragged triangle of a shirt that parachutes over one’s shoulders not unlike the actual one in elementary gym class. The up, up, up. Scramble for position. Fabric collapsing all about the center. Temporary breathlessness exchanged for the desire to move freely as a solitary body in space.
    
On this Friday, which felt like a Thursday if for no other reason than time, too, became warped as weather, a solitary hearse sat outside the town funeral home. A hearse outside a funeral home did not represent anything abnormal, but this particular hearse on this particular day felt like an omen if one believed in those things. Strolling by, you thought to yourself Someone died. I wonder if it’s me? And as that question rolled around like a pair of lazy dice inside your mind, Jersey Giants scratched up yards searching for something edible below the cake of earth while generating small plumes of dust. Mini-cyclones of desiccated, lifting and landing somewhere to the left of human persuasion.
    
Humans could be persuaded of nearly anything these days. And so ambled on the amblers, whistling that half-hum whistle that occurs when you split the difference on a check and somehow end up paying for the side of oysters you didn’t eat. The pretense of everything being equal and not quite shaking that shake that one shakes when the world has gone crisp in the broiler and someone removes the battery from the smoke detector. All that subsequent smoke supplied and delivered regardless of demand to the backdrop of an I-phone shuffle cued to London Grammar’s “Wicked Game” hold the Isaak.

And you have been there all along, somewhere stage right where the deer have gone patchy from disease, and you think of the world, fire, and you know there isn’t a pine box large enough. But oh, how beautiful those daffodils.