Saturday Fog.

All day long a fog hung up in the neighborhood trees, up around the lightposts, off in the corners of the yards. There was a quiet, muffled morning dogwalk. Mud and grit in the streets. Another tenth of an inch of rain — up to .6 inches or so for the 36-hour period, and some of the forecasts are wanting to give us as much as another inch tomorrow. After that a good Arctic high is supposed to sweep through and give us January in a kind of serious crisp way, the kind of week that keeps the bulbs in the ground a little longer.

AMR leaves for the month on the second, and that's kind of hanging around the house, too.

I've discovered Bill Evans, which is a little like last summer when I discovered Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Hey, I asked my friends, who've been preaching to me for years about my sad little music collection. Did you know about Bob Dylan and Neil Young? Yes, they said. We do not live in caves.

Bill Evans: piano player on Kind of Blue, among other things. Addicted to most things he could find. Inventor, so they say, of the jazz trio. Might I recommend, then, for your listening pleasure, The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961. The first democratic jazz combo, they say, which is to say, they say, that Evans found a way to let the bass and drums share the stage with him in a real way.

There's something about these 1961 recordings in particular that seems right for, oh, hell, fog— for winter. Glass with some ice in it. Settle down to listen. There's crowd noise. The recording values aren't terrific. Makes me like it all the more. There's a thing in it, in the way the three of them hear each other, play off each other, that seems not just good, but important. Something's going on here. You can hear something coming.

There were seven thousand squirrels on the dogwalk. Busy. Completing tasks. They can maybe feel January getting ready to show up.