A Master-ful jumble

It's late November out there today, or at least it wears the disguise. The rooftops are white with snow. There's a corresponding skein of white on the grass, punking out beneath the trees, where it gives in to the green beneath. And the sky?

The sky is that particular shade of gray that comes when the sun rides the southern rim of the world, not to warm our faces again until April.

Which is what this actually is, all play-acting aside. April 17. Thirty-four degrees and going down. Snow falling lightly on bursting forsythia and about-to-bloom trees.

So odd. So odd like all of this is odd, coming at you in fits and starts, arriving in unsettling flashes at times you don't expect.

It's Friday. Maybe I'll go have a drink somewhere late-- Oh.

I'd really like to go see that movie toda-- Oh.

Where do you want to go for dinner tonig-- Oh.

That sort of thing.

A November landscape in April only intensifies the sense of dislocation, and so I look outside and drink my coffee and shake my head at yet another layer of weird-on-weird. And then I look down at my laptop, and check out my news feed.

And see the PGA has rolled out its re-worked schedule for 2020, subject of course to the Bastard Plague.

And also see the Masters is now scheduled for -- yep, you guessed it -- November.

November 12-15, to be precise, and here is the oddness washing over you again. The Masters, ancient rite of spring, going off in the shadow of Thanksgiving? In the season of harvest instead of the season of planting? With winter tugging at our sleeves instead of summer?

So hard to wrap one's head around it. And that is especially true because, like no other golf tournament in the world, the Masters is wedded to the rhythms and flora of its season and place. If it is about birdies and bogies and the unraveling of psyches on the back nine on Sunday, it is as much about the magnolias and azaleas and the greening time of nature.

Watching a leader stumble at Augusta on a Sunday in early April is like watching a man being tortured in unspeakable ways in the middle of an English garden. The juxtaposition is like nothing else in sports.

But in November?

No azaleas. No magnolias. No English garden. Nature going quiet for the winter, instead of gaudily announcing its entrance.

This may be a more appropriate backdrop to watching the leader dunk one in Rae's Creek on Sunday afternoon. But it's that delicious juxtaposition that makes the Masters, the Masters. Appropriate backdrops are entirely inappropriate there.

Kind of like looking outside, on April 17, and seeing late November look back.