Trace Amount.

One good way to tell that it's started raining is that the exhaust fan ductwork for the range hood in the kitchen functions like an organ pipe or a bell or one of those tin can telephones, so there'll be a kind of pinging up over the stove, and then you know.

I'm going to go with a trace so far, if only so that I get to say 'trace.' A trace of rain. According to the UN, "...a "trace" is also recorded when there is no sign of precipitation in the gauge but it is known for certain that slight rainfall has occurred since the last raingauge reading." Full disclosure: there is a sign of precipitation in the gauge. It just doesn't yet cover the bottom. We're headed for more, and it hadn't started raining yet earlier, so at some point, Mr. Secretary-General, I feel like we had a trace.

It's cold out there, at least relatively. Yesterday I drove the dog to the Prison Farm to recycle the Christmas tree, and we had the windows down and the seventy-degree air blowing in all over the place. The dog did that eyes-seven-eighths-closed-and-squinting-into-the-sun-and-tasting-
the-air thing most of the way back. One of the many things she does that threaten to split me wide open. This morning, because it's gray and cool, we're getting instead the abject refusal to get up, or even, really, to move. She's currently involved in a very complicated dream involving a lot of barking with her mouth closed. Gray days she sometimes won't get up until mid-afternoon.

All that porch-sitting weather was about to get me ready for spring. But now it's hat and coat weather again and a different sort of happiness is settling back in, one I don't have to apologize for or feel guilty about. Soup weather. Yesterday we broke records. Today we're dead-on average. And once this front comes through, and the one behind it, we're forecast to have winter again, a string of cold days and cold nights and maybe one eye half on the local news to see if they can't squeeze out some kind of ice or snow toward the end of the old five-day. A set of tornado warnings in Birmingham and Nashville just isn't right. School closings. Give me school closings.