This may be April Fools Day but March did the fooling this year. April first is so thirty days ago!
Thanks to our exceptionally warm weather in late winter and early spring, April begins as many of its annual flowers have already come and gone. Here in central Missouri, it looks like May and feels like June. Were it not for the lack of summer birds, still waiting for their solar cue to come north, we'd have no April events to anticipate.
Whether or not winter will attempt a token return to the Heartland remains uncertain but our average last freeze is rapidly approaching. It appears that old man winter concentrated on the Eastern Hemisphere this year and that we might experience one of the longest frost-free periods on record, beginning back in February and, perhaps, lasting until October. Then again, the jet stream could shift and we might endure the coolest summer in recorded history; such possibilities fuel our interest in nature's fickle behavior and discourage complacency.
