Weather Pattern.

It's not warm out there, and it's not cloudless — it's not a lot of things — but it is the kind of day that threatens spring, eventually. And here we are only in January. It seems to be threatening other things, too: around the corner a man parked his car in someone's yard, got out, jogged to the front door, knelt down, and called in through the mail slot, Mr. Haynes, are you OK? Then the door opened. Whoever it was at the door seemed fine. No way to tell if that was Mr. Haynes or not. The man went inside. There was a dog, too. The door closed again.

This evening I'm going pen shopping. Made it to the end of another draft of the book, the product, in part, of this month-long one-man semi-ascetic writer's colony I've been trying in AMR's absence. I feel mildly damaged, run over, run down, run through— there's a kind of exhaustion here, today, printing day, that I'm not too familiar with. The book's not done — hence the need for pens, new pens, fancy good pens, to crib into the margins notes on all my mistakes and missteps and dumbasseries — but I've come to the end of another part of the making of it, and I'm weary. Sore. And just in time to go back to work, other work, school work. But also just in time for AMR to maybe try out living here again for a little while.

What I think I like best about the weather is that it just keeps coming, for the most part. That's what annihilates me in August, in fact, after it's turned hot and flat and bone dry and everything seems to be on the verge of burning off to ash — then it seems like it's not coming at us at all, not in any kind of motion. It seems to have pulled up to the curb and just stopped. But I'll have plenty of time to work on that in August. For now, the days keep pushing through, which is good, and we get mornings like this morning, the birds at work on their various projects and the cats on the screen porch in celebration of a little sunshine and me with the dog in the open front door, checking to see what's going on, thinking, There might be a little heat in that sun. Make good eye contact with the dog, nod towards the leash, see what she thinks we might ought to do next.