Pink Pig.

There was a kind of low rumble in the neighborhood this morning, and I sat inside with my coffee, not really worrying about much of anything except my coffee, but that rumble stayed there, stayed there, then got louder, and I figured, hell, just take a look out the window, and it was — the leaf truck! The leaf truck!

Here's the problem: I love an emergency, and I love large yellow machinery, so the leaf truck turning up a week or so early (for its second and final visit of the season) certainly takes us to at least DEFCON 2 or so ("further increase in force readiness, but less than maximum readiness") here at ANYLF world headquarters. Cut, then, to a kind of rake-sprint across my front yard, La Vieja's front yard, and hell, for good measure, a little bit across Phil's front yard, because he's kind enough to mow my side yard when it gets too long for him, and I figured I owed him the favor.

Cold and crisp and blisteringly cloudless and the kind of day one might require for, say, aerial photography, and I'm rakesprinting and suddenly: I am thirteen years old and at some Atlanta Area Boy Scout something — jamboree? exposition? — that was held every year, when we were kids, in and outside of the World Congress Center, in December, I believe, and it was always bitterly cold, like a-hundred-and-thirty-five-degrees-
below-zero cold, and there were two kinds of Scouting exhibitions at this jambosition: the bullshit kind, indoors, and the badass kind, with lashings and whatnot, outdoors. Inside Scouts: worthless. Frigid outdoor Scouts, lashing together ziplines and three-rope bridges and cooking biscuits in cast-iron crock pots? Let's just say that maybe my whole weather-as-competition thing (I used to love to camp in the 33-degree rain, because I thought that was a pretty good way of determining who should live and who should not go camping) started somewhere in this vicinity.

Also: Same time of year: The Pink Pig, a very, very strange holiday tradition on top of the Rich's building in midtown in Atlanta. The Pink Pig is a Pig-shaped roller coaster that somehow equals Christmas. Also very, very cold.

That's what it smelled like out there this morning. Three-rope bridges and The Pink Pig. That kind of winter.

The leaf truck has still not gotten to this side of the street. The dog, overseeing things from the porch, kept looking at me like she knew there was no real emergency.