Springtime, I guess

Fickle, fickle spring. A little over a week ago, it hit 72f in my little post-industrial town in SW Montana. Now...

Fall before last, my youngest daughter Emily planted bulbs along the iron fence in front. Last spring, the crocus came up in late May. A week ago, they were up, nearly a month early, perhaps encouraged into thinking spring was here. 

Not the best picture, but you can make out the white blossoms, wondering what was going on.

I've been out fishing, over a week ago at the start of the warm, beguiling, and ultimately false weather. The Big Hole was at around 1400 cfs when a friend and I arrived, three hours later it had rose a foot and colored up. We then went up one of the tributaries that flow in from the south, and fished. The brookies rose readily to a #16 royal wulff, and I saw pairs of rainbows on the gravel redds. I didn't cast over the rainbows, though they might have rose. Not through any real moral reason, rather that I don't think I would have appreciated someone tossing hooks through my bedroom river at a moment when I might have gotten lucky.

So, after looking at the beleaguered flowers this morning, I came back inside and took the vase of Iris from the fireplace mantle and placed it on the sill, as a shield perhaps against the reminder the winter ain't quite done with us. 

In a few minutes I'll head out to the BS cafe for breakfast, grouse to Sandy and the other pensioners like me who gather in the morning to tell the same stories countless times, compare new aches, and talk about the May Day disturbances in Seattle. 

These kids today, with their clothes, hair and music. Somewhere my dad is walking a river with the teenage me, listening to me pontificate on how we're a different generation, we'll be accepting of people different than us. He'll look sideways at me, rub his chin in that way he had and hide his grin with his hand.