January Resolution.

A quick evening dogwalk this last day of January offers up a kind of fog-mist hanging up in the streetlights, a damp, clothes-clinging cold, and enough lights wrapped around porches and wreaths still hung in doorways to make me not feel too badly about my own 500 blue lights still strung, if not lit, around my own windows and door. Sorry to have left the last half of last week out in the cold, as it were: We rode the Toad first west over the mountains to Nashville to meet his great-grandparents, and then rode him back east and home again, and all that left precious little time for the weather. The weather stops for no Toad, though, and I can tell you this: The ride out was cold; the ride back was not. Winter westward, then a snap spring and windows down back east, and now, tonight, home again, winter again. With something in the air. As aforementioned. The squirrel man, on his way out of the driveway: If it rains tomorrow, and it's cold like this, it ain't gonna be rain. Amen, squirrel man.

The squirrels are, we think, resolved. Pulling into the driveway tonight, the headlights brightening the building in the back corner there, I was flooded with this enormous relief, plus love for the squirrel man, who was so, so kind, and did not once chide me for my soffitry, or lack thereof. Repetitive noise, repetitive noise. Much of my life is repetitive noise. I do not do so well with repetitive noise. I had begun to dream about the squirrels getting in, chewing my spendy double doors. On the dogwalk I listened for barking dogs.

Cold tonight. Cool tomorrow, with some activity. And then mid-sixties on Wednesday? Can it be true? I don't know for sure that I believe. Highs back where they have been -- mid-forties -- by Thursday and Friday. And there's your forecast for the workweek, friends and fans of weather, and there's your January, as resolved. Small bits of weather. Doesn't have to be much. And it worked: the book drags itself along. Happy new year. Happy January. Happy February. Happy Monday. Now go outside and stand in the quiet and the lees of the stove fire and listen: That absence of sound in the ceiling is what you want, what you have been wanting all along. What comes next? Something. We just don't yet know what.