Spring is three to four weeks early this year, and it’s a little unsettling. My apple trees are on the verge of bloom, and the lilacs aren’t far behind. I gave a party last year for Patrick’s girlfriend on her birthday, which is the end of May, and I have photos of the lilacs in bloom. It’s not yet the end of April.

My veggies are all coming up just fine, and it looks (knock wood) like my premature planting wasn’t so premature after all this year. I’ve started bringing the tomatoes and peppers up in the daytime and putting them in the storm-windows-leaning-against-the-wall cold frames so they can get used to the real world out here. I’m thinking it may be time to start setting up the wall-o-waters, which are most effective if you give them a week or so to heat up the soil. It’s all very strange, spring so soon. We’re all enjoying it, but are haunted by visions of drought and fire later this summer.

And the mother’s day caddis-fly hatch on the Yellowstone happened this weekend — three weeks early. Very strange. Bill said they were so thick down at the Mallard’s Rest fishing access that the fishing wasn’t acutally any good — the river was just clogged with caddis flies.

I spent yesterday over on the Jefferson River with my friend Wendy-the-Buddhist. Wendy has a talent for trip logistics, which is good since the parts I ordered so I can use my old Yakima rack on the new car didn’t come last week (well, actually, they did come but they were the wrong parts). It was one of those weeks and I almost bailed on boating because the logistics were overwhelming, and I was having a big old sadness relapse and it all seemed like way too much effort. Luckily, Wendy was undeterred, and showed up at my house at 8:30 to get the canoe, and off we went. It was a beautiful day — in the 60′s and sunny. The river was very low, but fun nonetheless — and there was no one there, not even driving the highway that runs alongside the river. We saw sandhill cranes, who rose clacking from the riverside and wheeled around overhead for a bit before settling in another grassy spot upstream. We saw a lot of ducks and geese and meadowlarks were singing on the fenceposts. When we pulled over to the side for a break, an enormous golden eagle rose out of the grass about ten feet away with a (dead?) wood-rat in it’s talons and flew off — that was very cool. And a couple of hours later, we pulled off the river, had a restorative frosty beer, did the shuttle and loaded the boat back up, and were on our way back home. It was a perfect afternoon, and effectively banished the blues. I came home sleepy from sunshine and a little light exercise and a day spent on a river with a great friend.

It’s raining this morning for the first time in weeks. It’s been a weirdly warm and dry spring here in Southeast Montana — the driest March on record at the airport over in Bozeman, and last week I had to break out the hoses and start watering. While the sunshine was a blessed relief after a long dark winter, such a relief that I wound up in my backyard, basking in a strappy tee-shirt despite my long-proven tendency toward sunburn. I felt like one of those TB victims from an old photo — sent outside to soak up fresh air and sunshine for curative purposes.

But this morning it’s raining. A perfect, soft, steady rain. The temperature’s hovering just above freezing, so I think my little sproutlets out in the garden will be okay. The Precovelle peas sprouted last week, but no sight yet of the Montana Marvels. The greens are all up: arugula, raddichhio mix, endive mix, agretti, and kale. I planted two kinds of broccoli raab, an early and a late variety, and they’re both up as well. I adore broccolli raab — that lovely dark green bitterness, so perfect with oriecchetti and sausage, or simply steamed like Chinese gai lan and dressed with soy and sesame oil. It is impossible to find around here, and I’m planning to grow as much as I can. I have some spinach that overwintered, but transplanting it to a new bed set it back a bit — it seems to be recovering, and the seeds I interplanted among the transplants are up as well. I’m slightly impatient about the spinach because that’s the bed in which I plan on planting beets later in the season. So this morning, my little rows of seedlings are out there, being bathed in a perfect soft rain of the sort we so seldom see out here.

Montana only gets 14 inches of rain, on average per year. We rarely have these lovely soft wet days — more typical is the sudden thunderstorm, or hailstorm, or late-season snow. I’ve been out west long enough that our sere landscape now seems normal to me, and when I go back to the Midwest, particularly in the summer. I feel nearly suffocated by the humidity and the greenness. I remember my bewilderment at my Great-Aunt Irma’s claims that after having lived on the plains most of her life, she found too many trees claustrophobic. I couldn’t imagine that when I was in high school, living in the leafy suburbs of the North Shore, a place where cutting a tree was a serious sin, but I think of Irma every time I fly back into Chicago, staring out the window of the plane, amazed by the sight of so many ponds and creeks and rivers, full of water even as late as August or September. It’s how I knew I’d finally become a westerner, when I found myself surprised not that the rivers here dry up late in the summer, but rather, when I found myself surprised that the watery midwest remained so all year round.