Weather Watch.

We're having, it seems, October tornadoes. Y'all hunker down out there, please, and more about this tomorrow. Two weeks away and we get seventy overnight degrees on the eve of November. Somebody around here should start paying a little more attention, it seems.

Edging Closer.

Yesterday evening, walking the Toad through the park in the very end of the sunlight, I said to AMR, Thank god today's not Sunday. Why? she said. Because then tomorrow would be Monday, I said, and on Mondays I have to do my job. And now here we are, and it's Sunday, and tomorrow, then, is Monday, as it almost always is, which means looms the job and etcetera, but the weather is so good it turns out I cannot care. I mean, it's there, the workweek is, with all its attendant glory, but ANYLF is reporting live from the slowest front porch there is, and the jays are out here hollering at each other, and I can hear something chewing or rooting or both over in the holly bushes, and I have a brand new pair of bluejeans on that are a little too cool for a person like me but who cares, and the Toad naps upstairs, and even Mendenhall with its trucks banging by sounds correct. Kids down the hill are screaming about the rules and subsets of rules of a game that seems to involve throwing something hard, like a rock, at something else hard, like a piece of corrugated metal roof.


The droughtsmacked trees are starting to turn here, which means next weekend's mountain trip will probably be to a place that's already turned and long since quit, but that's OK, too. Pretty up there with leaves, pretty up there without. The big plans for the rest of the day down here on the Piedmont: wash the dishes, push a rag around the kitchen counters, wait for 4:30ish in the p.m., when there are large hopes for an outbuildinged toad, some AM radio, a Braves playoff game. I got the pansies in the ground this week. I did a little weeding. I wrote more days than not. The facts of the case are these, and they are undisputed.

78 degrees on the front porch. No clouds. Not enough breeze to say breeze, but the humidity feels single-digited, so we're cool. Not chilly. A little warm, even, over the top of the cool. But cool. And in the evenings—in the evenings, if you don't yet want a hat, it's simple enough to imagine how it'll be that way soon enough. We are having autumn. We are having front porch weather. There is really, friends and fans of weather, only the front porch. Everybody around here seems to think so, anyway.

Fundamentals, Fundamentals.

Here is an October evening: up late watching the Braves lose a game they're bound to lose, a wee bit of ice in a wee glass, no conferences scheduled puppetshowward tomorrow, the windows open—and oh, by the way, we're now firmly in that kind of fall wherein if you leave the windows open at night, you'll cool off, and if you leave them open in the day, you'll warm back up. Blanket weather. Damaged sentence weather. Heavy shirt weather, but not any longer flannel weather. That was earlier this week. This morning it was warm in the sun for the first time in days. Tuesday and Wednesday were Novemberish. Today was Septemberish—and this is good, since even though it is now October, we had no September to speak of, and we will take it wherever it is.

There is SanFran's rail-thin Lincecum striking out his twelfth Brave. Here is the place where it gets easier to hope less.

Hoping less: this is the essence of baseball. I love other sports—hell, I love most sports—but there is nothing like 162 games to explain, in full and without question, what heartbreak looks like across a landscape and a timeline. Thirtyish cities take six months to give in to the inevitable. Pitchers and catchers report at the end of February. We look good for next year. There is always, friends and fans of weather and of baseball, next year.

It's dry out there, and cool. And it will be for a time. We'll see eighties, but it won't much matter. It'll still feel like fall. Cut that TV or radio on, tune in to a game, and it'll feel like fall there, too. I used the woodstove out in the writing shed earlier this week, more to check to make sure it still worked than anything else. I won't need it again for a week or so, but now I know, and, as they say in baseball, now you're ready, Perry. Now you're ready. Keep your head in. Be a hitter. Here we go, now. Here we go.

Chilly Nights.

It's turned cold. Except that's not true: it's turned cool, and it was so hot for so long that it seems cold. The evening dogwalk with the Toad meant a hat for him, a hat for me. The house is cold. Or cool. It's 67 in here. It was 64 this morning, upstairs and down. It's only two or three degrees warmer than we keep it in January. I will not turn the heat on. I will not turn the heat on. I will not turn the heat on. (But I will happily use the woodstove in the writing shed.) We landed in the forties overnight. We're in the forties now. TWC wants us right at 40 for the overnight low tonight. Which means somebody's bound to see 39. Thirty-nine. Say it with me, friends and fans of weather, or say it at your convenience. Doesn't matter. We have shifted, have tilted past the edge, have sailed, finally, past that point beyond which there be dragons. I have inventoried the flannel. I have found the hats. It is fall.

Someone in the neighborhood pulled our emptied trash cans off the street and put them back in the driveway where they belong. When I was a teenager and slept past one on Sundays, my dad would mow the lawn to prove a point. Didn't work then, won't work now. Though dear sweet baby Jesus firing up an old green Lawn Boy do I remember the sound of my having lost the battle, the smell of me figuring out if I could still win the war.

I wrote this morning. I wrote yesterday morning. Shocking what that will do for making one feel like one writes.

Seasons Change.

Autumn arrives, all at once and in full—I've been in long sleeves since Friday, did actual work in the actual outside in those same long sleeves today—we were so hot for so long I didn't quite believe it would ever come, and surely didn't believe it would arrive like this, seemingly to stay. Maybe we saw seventy today. Maybe we'll see it tomorrow. We're dropping hard through the sixties and fifties right now, are trying for the forties both of the next two nights and most of the next ten, say the fancies. I don't recall the season ever shifting here exactly like this, so all-at-once like this. I love it. I'll take it. There was a bagpiper down in the park on Friday morning. It rained like all hell Wednesday night. We put the end of the subfloor in the shed on Saturday afternoon. These are the things that have happened. That, and the weather changed. Maybe for good. We can only hope.

Trash piled by the curb. Ice in the glass. Coffee made for the morning. Chicken chili for dinner. Happy dog, quiet cats, sleeping Toad. Braves, impossibly, in the playoffs. Football season. The outside edging possibility of woodstove season. Chance of rain. Chance of all else.