We all go mad after fifty.

I. 

We all go mad after fifty.

Minnesotans, that is, on the first day in the spring with temps over 50ºF. 

It's certainly not spring yet here, but the sap is rising (it's maple-tapping season), and we're having a fluke of a warm day––

a whopping and sunny 57ºF (14ºC)–– and, truly, people are going nuts:

I just came home from walking around the lake, where I saw a guy in sandals (though the walking path is slushy with melting ice), lots of people in T-shirts, and--weirdest of all---everyone smiling at everyone else.

{Not normal.}

I stopped on my way home and bought my favorite beer, black ale from the Bent Paddle brewery in Duluth.

It tastes, in the best possible way, like the smell of roasting coffee beans.

I sat on my back porch for little longer than it took to snap this photo--it's not quite sitting-outside weather.

II.
I've been watching Inspector Lewis (British mysteries)--
set in Oxford. Here's Lewis (right) with his young partner Hathaway (detective partner, that is), reading, poetry? 

I haven't seen this episode, maybe he's just looking at his crime notes, but Hathaway, a rather troubled intellectual, does quote poetry---cheerful stuff, as you might imagine, like William Cowper's "The Castaway":  

    We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

I'm more in the mood for "The Flower" by George Herbert:

   Grief melts away   

   Like snow in May,

  As if there were no such cold thing.

For romantic bliss, reading with someone at an outdoor café is right up there with reading together in bed, in my book.

It speaks of being the same trust and ease as when you go visit a friend to socialize, but, tired, fall asleep on their couch instead.