The first warm day of spring in Alabama never announces itself politely. It does not slip in through the back door or whisper gentle promises about sunshine and daffodils. No sir. It crashes in like a distant cousin who shows up uninvited, kicks off his boots, and asks what you got in the fridge. One minute, the air is cold enough to make your teeth clack like nervous castanets. The next minute, you find yourself sweatin’ through a flannel shirt you were certain you still needed that morning.

In Piedmont, folks know this day by feel. It comes with a smell in the air that is part warm dirt and part pine bark waking up from its winter sulk. It comes with a single bee buzzin’ around too early for its own good. It comes with robins struttin’ across the yard like they own all of north Alabama.

But mostly, it comes with men.

Grown men.

Men who, not twenty-four hours earlier, were complainin’ about the cold. Men who spent the winter huddled around space heaters, holdin’ their coffee like it was a campfire in a blizzard.

On March First, though, these same men melt into lizards.

You will find them stretched out across porch steps, arms folded behind their heads, eyes half closed as if they have discovered the secret to eternal peace. They turn their faces toward the sun like Sunday School children waitin’ for a peppermint from Sister Margaret. Their backs hit those warm wooden boards with the same sound a big ol’ tomcat makes when he flops into a sun puddle on the carpet.

It is a scientific fact that Alabama men can detect porch warmth through three layers of denim. One minute, they are fussin’ with yard tools. The next minute, they have gone flat, motionless, halfway to sleep, and shaped like the chalk outline of a man who died from relaxation.

Old Mr. Lane down the road was the champion of this ritual. Every year, he tottered out of his house wrapped in more winter layers than any living creature ever needed. By lunchtime, he would shed those layers like cast-off snake skins and wind up sittin’ shirtless in a lawn chair, his belly reflectin’ the sunlight like a polished ivory dome. He claimed the warmth healed his back and cleared his sinuses, but I suspect it just made him too content to get up again.

The younger men followed suit. You would see them leanin’ on truck beds, talkin’ slow, one boot propped up like a balancing act. They would scratch the back of their necks and say things like:

“Feels like God lit up the big heat lamp today.”

Or:

“Lordamercy, I think my bones are thawin’ out.”

Or my personal favorite:

“A man could get used to this.”

And then they never moved again.

Even the dogs got in on the business. They sprawled in every patch of sun like they were tryin’ to fuse with the Earth itself. A hush fell over the yards, not because anything was quiet, but because everything was right.

The first warm day of spring in Alabama does that. It cracks open winter’s hold. It softens folks up. It coaxes them out of their houses like sun-drunk lizards who forgot they had chores. For one golden afternoon, the whole town slows down, sighs deep, and remembers that warm light is a gift worth pausin’ to soak in.

I reckon the good Lord made this day for that very reason.
So grown men can lie motionless on porches, dreamin’ lizard dreams, and call it “bein’ productive.”

*****

New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.