Everyone Be Quiet and Go Back to Sleep

Please; I am begging.

Fencebroke Promontory is run amok with feather-light sleepers. Fitful bed-thrashers abound; from our beloved (but tending nocturnal) Daisy to the young nectarine out back, which felt warm sun and heard birds chirping and jumped out of bed into full bloom, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, sometime in February.

A mild (to downright non-existent) Winter is to blame. We all tossed and turned through the holidays, saw the dawn's glow on the solstice, and figured we may as well get up if we couldn't sleep. The bulbs put on a pot of coffee. The ornamental plums started frying bacon and roused all the later Spring-blooming trees to an early breakfast. Insomniac perennials, having stayed up all night watching TV with Witch Hazel and its winter-buddies, look ragged and surly. The raspberries partied late into fall, passed out for a couple hours, and woke up hungover. They whipped up a batch of bloody-marys for everyone: it's going to be a long year. The bees look confused. The birds got the worms.

Meanwhile, The lawn is getting a head start on its yearly campaign, seeking to establish an autonomous prairie state; the weeds are staking their stubborn claims; the veggie garden is looking for action and the fruit trees are playing chicken with late frosts. Customers at work are frothing at the mouth, making delirious, sleep-deprived demands for basil, tomatoes, and petunias. Daisy, for her part, has taken to late-night nature documentaries.

It is a boisterous, caffeine-fueled and thoroughly exhausting start to the year. There is a tenuous energy and optimism to the place which threatens, with every mild afternoon, to collapse into a lengthy and catastrophic series of naps.

I, for one, am going back to bed. If you could all keep it down for a couple weeks, I'd greatly appreciate it. I'll never make it to May at this pace.