Headed Out.

Chilly and sunny to start the day. High clouds smoothing in over the top of everything now. Still chilly, like the weekend storm came through and took us back down into March. We've got a kind of high still gray-whiteness covering most everything. Filtered light. Sunlight through a t-shirt, or a piece of typing paper. A very, very big piece of typing paper.

The weather project has turned difficult, suddenly, even as we've broken out of D-4 drought (exceptional) and dropped back into D-3 (extreme). What to say about such a thing as that? That we're now less likely to die immediate, parched deaths? And there's the problem: I do better when I'm looking out the window, cheering storms in, counting up half-inches in the rain gauge. I do better when I'm some way other than this, which is to say, when I am other ways than as though a skein of thin clouds has blown in over the top of everything. Or a skint. The first year I took fall break up in Grayson, it snowed, sort of, such that there was a kind of rimed crust on everything. The woman who'd rented me the place came down in her blue pickup that morning to pick up her check. Did it snow? I asked her. I think it snowed.

Maybe just a skint, she said.

Maybe I need the little deaths of fall. Somehow all these trees just starting to leaf has me melancholy. Or maybe it's just that the goddamned beagles across the street barked this morning from 4 to 5. Amazing what plans involving Molotov cocktails and antifreeze will do to your mood.

I shouldn't complain. Before the clouds came in, I prepped my class in lawn chairs even though it was too cold to do it. Wore my heavy flannel shirt, faced my chair into the sun, huddled down into myself, read my 79 pages. And now, even as I finish this up, aim for the truck, for my porch, for those beagles, the sun's broken back out again. It's colder out there than it looks. Maybe that's what's got me. I'm looking out the window. I am. I'm even headed out into it. I just can't quite tell what it's doing out there.