What is to rare as a really nice day in April?

April is a month of teasing weather here. By my count we had only four really lovely days -- yesterday and today are two of them.  I may have been mostly indoors a couple of others.  The first one of them was the best of all and I wrote a poem about it. 

(photo here is great-grandson nearly a year ago with the aged cat who did not make it through the winter.  There's talk of a trip to the ASPCA for another.)

Here is the poem I wrote for about fickle April.

               Aprill: Long Beach

Today's early-in-April sunshine
has a determined, adolescent strength--
Charles Atlas in his 98-pound weakling days.
The breeze ruffling the grass shakes its fists
like a freckle-faced sixth grade bully.
Far past my own adolescenece, I welcome
this youthful day in fickle April.
I drive to Long Beach and find it nearly empty.
I claim as my own this mile-long spit of land,
marsh gass and still brown tangles of thorny roses.
A flat-land farmer's daughter who didn't see
an ocean until I was twenty-three,
I feel young where I never was when young.

As I walk the damp sand, I peel off my jacket
and tie it around my waist; I push up my sleeves--
Come, Sun , pour your vitamin  D into me.
I see footprints in the sand--not sneaker prints--
bare, man-size  footprints--and paw prints too.
I look the length of the gently curved shore.
Who dared the chilly sand so early?
I do not see him--"Friday"--the native, I surmise.

The tide reaches, then resides reluctantly.
To my right, sun jewels flash on the water,
to my left, a wind-row of broken shells,
once stony homes to tiny globs of life.
I settle in a spot where I often pause to gaze on
the blue illusion we call horizon,
where sky and water only seem to meet
because we are small, our perspective limited
and they are vast, eternal.  Oh, yes,
I've considered that metaphor, but won't today.
Breezy fingers ruffle my hair inviting me to play.
Yes, April, child of early spring,
I will join your flirty game.
I pull off my sneakers and socks.
I'll make another pair of prints.
Perhaps I'll let the lapping water
lick my feet.