On Monday it was 72 degrees. I wore shorts. I sat on my porch. I thought: we made it. Winter is over.

On Tuesday it snowed four inches.

On Wednesday it was 65 and sunny. The snow melted. Crocuses appeared. Hope returned.

On Thursday a wind came through that knocked my grill off the deck and sent my neighbor’s trampoline into the street. High of 38.

On Friday it was 70 again. My wife planted tomatoes. She looked at me with an expression that said, “I know this is a mistake but I’m doing it anyway.” I said nothing. Marriage is knowing when to say nothing.

I have lived in Bozeman for nineteen years and I have kept a weather journal for seventeen of them. In that time, May has delivered snow fifteen out of seventeen years. It has produced at least one day above 75 degrees in all seventeen years. It has combined both in the same week fourteen times. In 2021, it snowed on May 28th and hit 82 on May 30th, a 48-hour swing that I believe aged my tomato plants and my marriage by roughly equal amounts.

April gets the literary credit for cruelty, thanks to T.S. Eliot, who lived in London and had no idea what he was talking about. London in April is drizzly and gray. Bozeman in May is a meteorological personality disorder. It’s not cruel in the poetic sense. It’s cruel in the way that a cat is cruel when it brings you a bird that’s still alive.

You can’t plan around it. You can only endure it, keep a coat in the car through June, and accept that your tomatoes will die at least once before they live.

Russell Coldwater is a retired civil engineer who has never once had a successful tomato harvest before July.