I have this awful feeling that we may be in the middle of it.
We’ve had this happen before. Often enough, at least in this part of the country, we get some of our best weather of the year in late March and early to mid-April. The weather goes sunny and still, and though nighttime temperatures can drop to freezing, daytime temperatures rise into the high 60’s if not the low 70’s F — pretty warm for this part of the world. Then May hits and it starts to rain…
Today would be the sixth or maybe seventh day straight of this kind of weather. The cats have been having (literally) a field day in the increasing hours of sunlight, doing a lot of hunting in the grass of the the “paddock” or empty fenced field next to the house. The kittens seem to have found a nest of mice, and every day more livestock of various kinds gets brought into the kitchen to be played with and lost under major appliances (if said livestock is still alive, which is often the case). We’ve had mice and shrews and various large bugs, and I expect the first frog any minute now.
It’s good weather to garden in. Every hour or so I get up from writing to go out and do a few minutes’ worth of work on the second part of the rockery I started building the year before last. Originally this was just a rock-studded, weedy dirt bank with rocks and various ancient garbage embedded in it, and a hedge growing on top. During 2001 I dug that bank out, got rid of the weeds, rearranged many rocks, added some new ones, and put in various alpines and rockery plants. In 2002 we ordered in a fishpond “shell” to replace the cinderblock-and-pool-liner fishpond we’d erected in the walled-up spot where there had once been a gate into the yard.
With great labor (because the substrate ground is rocky) Peter dug out the hole for this shell. (During part of that period I was away on business, and the neighbors started teasing Peter about the hole he was digging, and the fact that they hadn’t seen me for a week or so.) Now it’s become time to deal with the bank on the left side of the fishpond. There’s no digging to do there — it’s just a place where the hedge grows on and in the older stone wall, part of which kept that joyriders’ car out of our house the other night. What I’ve been doing is taking the “spoil” that Peter dug out from the fishpond site and dumping it, bucket by bucket, at the foot of that wall, while adding some big stones to continue the rockery. The plants — heathers, daphne, skimmia, mahonia, various others — are lined up are all ready to plug in, in their appropriate order, as the groundwork is laid for them. Pretty soon this side of the rockery 
will extend right over to the wire fence that keeps the sheep out on the left side of the house. When that’s done, I’ll finish the rockwork around the front of the pool, making a place for the cats to sit and look at the fish, and in back, a waterfall.
There’s some slight urgency about all of this, since there’s never any telling how long this kind of weather will last. This morning’s map from Digital Atmosphere suggests that the high that’s been sitting over us has now passed on, leaving us for the moment with a benign but not very permanent “pressure trough”.
Better go out and move a few more buckets of dirt, before it all turns to mud…
