Il Pleut.

The airport's only saying something like an inch and three-quarters, but I don't know. The new sump kicked off and on all afternoon and evening, and the outbuilding let some water through there under the sill of the door, and one of the windows spit something at me while I was sitting out there trying not to make too fatal a mistake there at the end of the new novel, and the yard was as wet as I've ever seen it—only problem is, we probably still had an aggregate inch or so of moisture left in places when that all started Thursday night, plus the ground was all but completely sogged in, so there's no real telling what happened by straight divining. We're tied to airport measurements here at ANYLF until somebody remembers to buy a rain gauge at the big box. Been a week since anybody even walked into a big box, but that'll soon change: feels like a dice roll leaving ANYLF 709 1/2 covered only in Tyvek. Time to finish Phase One, or whatever phase we're in out there now. One side benefit, or maybe this is the principal benefit: I did finally woodstove my way yesterday to the point I'd wanted ever since I hired Crazy McPhee of Crazy McPhee's Chimney and Mannequin Legs to drop that stove in through the roof: I had to take off one of my layers. Got too hot out there. Seventy degrees at about 5:30 p.m. Loved it. I loved it so much I was OK with the damn leak under the door.

People, it is 11:45 in the Saturday morning and it is snowing. This won't add up to anything, but it's pretty. Prettier than the box of rain we got yesterday.

I've been thinking about other Januaries and other Februaries and wondering about what's up with our winter this year, being that we seem to be having actual winter, and I have an utterly unscientific theory: We're not necessarily colder, and/or that's not quite what's up. Rather: we're wetter. It rains now. Il pleut. Il pleut des cordes. And all them ropes of rain, in this humble child's opinion, may just be riling the general atmosphere enough to sometimes bring down iceboxed air back behind them, or over the top of them, and viola: snow, ice, rain, what have you. Sit through a still dry December/January/February and there's not much to bring anything your way other than still and dry. That'll give you daffodils eight and ten inches out of the ground by Christmas. That'll give you fifty degrees in the evening. And that's nice and all, and I'm not saying all this cold gray hasn't left me wanting a hint of spring, but there is something, finally, comforting about a sort of everything-in-its-place mode of operation, which is to say, if we're meant to have winter, why then, perhaps we should have it.

We're forcing paperwhites in a glass vase here at the kitchen table. On a gray day, that does help.