My life has slowed down a few notches since moving from San Francisco to a small town. This is a change I’ve embraced with open arms. As the days grow warmer, I remember my epiphany from last summer. The reason Southerners like to sit on their porches and sip sweet tea (picture Andy, Opie, and Aint Bea) is because it’s just too hot to do anything else. 

Steve and I rock on our porch every day, watching the birds and the sky. We’ve become amateur ornithologists and meteorologists. Or maybe we’ve just morphed into batty older people. You be the judge.

We feel like we know our birds personally. We talk to them and call them by name. Our brilliant red cardinals are all named Albert, after Saint Louis Cardinal Albert Pujols. There’s Albert 1 and Albert 2 and so on (you get the idea). The less showy females are Carolina and Virginia, after the states. We ran low on creativity with their offspring, who all bear the identical name Junior. There’s a mama dove who sits on her nest just outside our front door. We call her Dana Dove after my good friend with the same name. If the birds fail to fascinate, Applejack the jackrabbit and a family of deer keep us entertained.

Then there’s the weather. Not only do the seasons vary (a welcome change from seasonless California), but every day is different than the one before. We moved to North Carolina during the snowiest winter in decades, which was followed by the hottest summer anyone could remember, followed by the coldest winter. And now we’ve lived through the stormiest spring. Summer evenings are all about watching lightning bugs or thunderstorms, both of which we missed on the West Coast.

So . . . what’s the verdict? Are we batty or are we balanced?