Casus Belli

Spring training?

Spring is in the air, but will there be baseball?

Signs abound here that winter has shot its bolt.

Where a week ago, daylight disclosed the sodden gray shoulders of distant hills, now everywhere their shapes are lost in a brownish blur of new foliage. Nearer hillocks disappear daily beneath a scrim of tumescent growth. At my window, grasses show green in patches and that stubborn northerly breeze that vexed my windowpanes each day since December now and again hints at a coming southwester. The air seems thicker too, ripe with rotten leaves and turned earth from a copse of trees beyond the pasture to our south. From my vantage above a rutted lane, I can see fresh mud spun up with each passing conveyance—equine, bipedal, and combustion-powered alike—and birds everywhere are showing signs of riot.

But the strike continues.