No Rain.

Gray days used to mean rain was in the offing one way or another, and so I'd like to register a kind of general complaint: I am starting to take the drought personally. I still love a good gray day, love how low and heavy and sort of apologetic everything feels, but I'm getting nervous — it's maybe 50 degrees, so it's not cold, not wintry, not really anything. The radar shows various compelling weathers happening to most everybody else all over the country. Here, it's gray. And still. And dry. I kicked some oak leaves around on the way to lunch.

Outside the building: a squirrel, fat for the winter, should winter arrive with any kind of force, licking the top of the iron gate that houses something serious and large and green, something to do with the electricity. I considered coming in and cutting a water bottle in half and filling it and setting it out there — in drought like this, what the hell do the squirrels drink, and where? I keep worrying about how there aren't any cupped leaves with a few tablespoons of water in them anywhere. I mean surely there's some kind of completely straightforward nature show voice-over explanation, like that they walk the half mile down to the pond and drink their fill, but I get worried just the same. Turns gray like this and my money says some kind of internal Darwinian bell goes off inside the squirrel saying Hang on, man, rain's coming, everything will be fine. But it ain't. What's coming is not much. Warmer weather. No rain. Thirsty squirrels.

It's supposed to turn 70 and sunny by Monday and I'll probably find a way to ignore that as a harbinger of a new more fiercely beautiful kind of doom, and instead wax on about one more day in the lawn chairs, a free day, one last glinting example of fall or spring, etc., and for now, I guess, I will love the gray day with the part of me that likes a kind of parentheses, likes a day that basically feels like it did not occur. Maybe, in fact, this isn't anything. Maybe it isn't even weather. This is just the blank canvas. Something else will happen, eventually. I just goddamn wish it would rain.