As I write this, it feels like June outside. The mornings are barely cool, and humid enough that sidewalks are damp, even when it hasn’t rained. The afternoon sun is bright and strong, and the rooms upstairs get hot from the sun beating on the roof. I hear children outside playing until at least 10 p.m., enjoying the warm temperatures and avoiding indoor stuffiness. And it’s March. We haven’t even had spring break, and it feels like summer vacation. Frank is wearing shorts to school, and the daffodils are still blooming. Maybe that’s why it feels like the world is spinning a little too fast, like instead of gaining an extra day with the leap year, we’ve lost about three months. It seems hard to believe that Caroline and Frank still have two and a half months of school this year; don’t their summer activities start next week? The weather has been so warm, so long, at such an unusual time of year, that it’s hard to avoid talk of global warming. Scientists caution that you can’t really prove that any single weather event — if a week of 80-degree days in March in Chicago is a single event — is attributable to the increase in average temperatures around the world. Indeed, while we here in the Midwest enjoyed one of the mildest winters in memory, Europe spent months in a deep freeze. The Midwestern bishops who travelled to normally comfortable mild Rome in February for their ad limina visits reported that the weather back home was better. And even if it is global warming, I hear people saying, they’ll take it if it means a dramatic shortening of the usually messy — if not brutally cold — Chicago winter. I’m not sold on that idea yet — not that it would be better to have a milder climate in Chicago, or that we’re done with winter for the year. Let’s just say we haven’t put the winter coats away yet. I think the strange weather might be playing into my sense of temporal disorientation because it’s not the only thing that seems to be moving too fast. Caroline will start high school next fall; it seems somewhere around last week that she was a toddler like Teresa. I still have pictures she colored for me on my cubicle walls. And when did Teresa get so tall, and start running everywhere and talking all day long? And how is it that Frank can be getting ready for middle school? The days are long, the saying goes, but the years are short. And if we are going to have June in March, the years are getting shorter every day. Ecclesiastes says, “There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. A time to give birth, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant,” (3:1-2). But while the sun and the temperatures are telling me it’s time to plant the summer flowers, I think I’ll hold off for a while yet. At least until the daffodils are done.