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It's coming.
It's time to change the air conditioning filters, shovel the ashes out of the wood burning stove, start preparing to see the yardman more than once every eight weeks and, most importantly, it is time for me to roll up my sleeves and plunge myself into the cool oasis of Florida folk music at the Will McLean Music Festival.
The festival takes place at Sertoma Ranch near Dade City, only a couple of miles, in fact, from my house, but it has special meaning to me this year because it is one of a couple of "training" camping trips I am making before a longer one this summer.
To that end, I am arriving early so nobody can see me struggling to read the directions to set up my tent and camp stove, or hear me muttering about the impossibility of making a decent frozen margarita without a cigarette-lighter plug adapter for the blender.
I have been going to the festival for the past 12 years - which is most of its existence. Along with the annual Florida Folk Festival at White Springs on Memorial Day weekends, it is an event around which I plan the rest of my year. Except for dire family emergencies, I have never missed either one.
Coming from a dysfunctional family, where reunions are prohibited by international treaties and restraining orders from courts at several different levels (Okay, they weren't, but they should have been), I spent a long time looking for some semblance of family and found it in the Florida Folk movement.
Like any family, we have great times together. We have an occasional spat, and our share of weddings, funerals and birthday and anniversary get-togethers.
Most of those become mini-concerts and even the saddest of them leave an enduring sweetness behind.
For years I have written about a series of what some people would call coincidences and others would call magic at the Will McLean festival.
I remember the day a bird suddenly appeared and flew three times around the head of the late Don Grooms as he sang Wild Bird.
And I remember the night a Ph.D. from USF, a land-use attorney from South Florida, and the chairman of the Seminole tribe gave me a chance to say I had actually heard music played by a doctor, a lawyer and an Indian chief.
But sometimes the event itself is sufficiently magical for those who are open to its enjoyment.
By the way, you do not have to be a musician to participate. The only instrument I play is an ocean drum, which is more noisemaker than instrument. Members of Southwind, the group with which I occasionally get on stage, wince when I forget myself and sing along. Fortunately, I do not have a microphone, although they have said that if I improve they will give me one, and if I improve after that, they will consider turning it on.
A far greater pleasure to me over the years has been that of introducing people to the festival and to Florida folk music in general. I have taken friends to the events and some of them now go back on their own. Readers of earlier columns have approached me on the festival grounds and told me they were there because they had read about it in one of my columns.
That's's one of those situations where you then pause, and wait to see if they are going to thank you or take a swing at you. Happily, it has always been the former.
My first date with my wife was to hear a country/folk group play in Homosassa, and as we were leaving she said, "you seem to know the nicest people."
She was right, of course, and then I remembered her political affiliation and understood that she probably hadn't been exposed to that many nice people in recent years.
There was a time when I would have mentioned that political party, just to stir things up, but I have mellowed since I retired, and would never take advantage of that kind of Grand Opportunity for Punditry.
Hope to see you at the festival.