Back Again.

The morning after Halloween: candy wrappers and Spiderman masks in the streets. Since then: cleaner, colder. Wednesday and Thursday looked like you'd want November to look like—wet and gray, low sky, early sunsets, hat weather. If someone rang your doorbell and wanted to see November, wanted to see it right away, that would have been what to show them. And we wake up on the first Friday morning of the month to this rinsed-through near-frost, high light blue sky and the tops of the maples already turned and fallen and blowing around in the lawns. Every year I forget that after the turn, the leaves fall top to bottom. Every year they do it again.

What do you want to know? That the weather happens every day, and that the forecast sometimes does not? No good answer that doesn't have the following elements: toad, novel, puppet show, toad, novel, puppet show. Sometimes dog. Sometimes out-of-towners. Sometimes pure laziness. Sometimes exhaustion. Sometimes an admixture of all of these and more.

The Toad is 155 days old.

Cold mornings we use the fire in the living room, I use the stove outside. Squirrels may be living in the eaves of the building. The plan: wear gloves, unscrew some of the soffitry, pull on whatever I find and duck the hell out of the way. That's coming either later on today or to a Saturday near you.

First freeze of the season forecast for tomorrow night. It smells like winter out there. We've shifted. We make a little more coffee than we did in the warmer months. The time changes Sunday night—or we do. It's one of the two.