We’ve had a string of lovely spring weather days so of course I was getting apprehensive. The underwear and sock supply was getting low, laundry had to be done soon, but if I put it off too long of course it was going to rain.

I use the washers at the Airport Laundromat but it’s a matter of personal pride that I take the clean wet laundry home and hang it on the line. One February day a few years back I had to use the dryers due to temperatures so cold everything would have frozen on the line, but the rest of the time I save my quarters and hang everything out to dry.

Mid-spring laundry line

Today was a perfect drying day: sunny, dry, and breezy, but not so windy that my socks and undies kept blowing off the drying rack.

We’ve had a lot of chilly, wet weather lately, so much that people keep wondering if it’s still March? April? This is still a fairly typical mid-spring laundry line: lots of jeans, no shorts, but only three pairs of longjohns and if you look very closely you may notice three T-shirts, two short sleeve and one long.

The dislocations of COVID-19 have erased all the usual spring markers. Annual town meetings always happen in April or early May, but none of them have happened yet. Ditto for town elections. School let out in mid-March, and we’re still not 100% sure when and where the high school seniors will be graduating.

I’m feeling guiltily grateful that my 50th high school reunion was last year. I went and had a ball. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” so the cliché goes, but if I’d been in the class of ’70 instead of the class of ’69 I wouldn’t have had a choice.

Masasyu’s Tam Lin and I when we first met, May 18, 2019, Canandaigua, N.Y.

Travvy passed almost a year to the day before COVID-19 stay-at-home orders went into effect. His care and my subsequent decision to adopt a puppy would have been more complicated in 2020 than they were in 2019, which is not to say that any of it was exactly easy when it happened.

Malvina Forester, my trusty 2008 Subaru, usually gets inspected in March, but thanks to COVID-19 everyone due for inspection in March or April got a two-month grace period. My grace period was drawing to a close, so this afternoon I headed down to Mid-Island Automotive, aka Kenny Belain’s, in West Tisbury.

Malvina is getting up in years, though not in mileage (she hasn’t hit 80K yet), so I don’t take passing for granted. The shiny new sticker was both a relief and a pleasure, plus it’s sort of cool that I got two extra months on my old sticker. March inspection dates are good, but May isn’t bad. August, however, is a PITA. I know this because old Tesah Toyota (1988–2003) got inspected in August. I think I managed to slide her inspection date into September, but I don’t remember how.

The huge bonus was the SUV in Kenny’s lot with Kansas plates. May has been a bust for the license plate game so far, for all the expected reasons, but Kansas is the cherry on top.

Like I said, it’s been a very good day.