Local Forecast.

It's raining, and it's blowing the windows around in their frames, and apparently the fancies want us to go from upper-fifties today—bulb-planting weather, however late, but at 75% off, who wouldn't take a chance on tulips and daffodils?—to mid-thirties and rain tomorrow. Winter rides back in on whatever it tends to ride back in on. Six snow-white horses? A big block of ice? A storm sliding all the way east from California?

I'm edging toward remembering, again, what this little experiment is meant to be. I think the crazed late-fall and winter made this space more of a luxury, or an obligation, or maybe both. What it's supposed to be is a wee spot to work on the sentence, on the temperature, on the pressure, on what comes next. There's been so much next of late, though, that I've been having trouble distinguishing from the now and the next, the next from the after that. But today, planting bulbs, dirt finally back under the fingernails and AMR inside and upstairs trying to get her office squared away, I remembered one more time why I so love the weather: you stand by yourself outside and it is often enough all there is, all you can be sure you know. This morning, before it rained, it smelled like rain. Warm rain. This afternoon, so warm that I finally had to take my hat off, it already smelled like we were headed back the other way.

Thirty-six degrees and rain ought to be a good solid test of whether or not I've taught myself the woodstove out back. Whether or not I've taught myself plot re: the new book is another thing altogether.

I'm going to try to be back. The rain gauge is broken. We'll have to go with a ruler dipped into the wheelbarrow for now. It has been blissfully, unseasonably warm. We are, however, for the next few days aimed squarely for January. This is the forecast. This is what there is.