Another Shift.

These last two days, my god, the dry air, the wind, the leaves coming down hard all through the neighborhood—we're in Thanksgiving Fall now, that post-bright tail end of the season, when even soaking rains don't really do much to shift the notion that it's dry, when warm days like this one don't slow the idea that it'd be best to get the bulbs in the ground, bank the mulch around the newer plants, generally and as always make ready. We've got the windows open in the house, and down here in the swampish corner of the yard I've got the double doors thrown wide on the shed, the foolish expense of them once more worth it. I make it to this little weather blog less and less these days, but perhaps that's OK: yesterday, in the time I would have written about the temperature and the whatever this is piling up and about to come through, I instead raked leaves with the Toad, laid in the yard, tried in vain to make the wonderful emptiness of a late Sunday morning last. No use. Here it is Monday. The week cranks itself again. Still. Do things seem OK? Is there the sense we may make it? The deep freeze in the basement is slowly stocking itself for the winter, full of chili and soup and chicken quarters. I've got two flats of pansies in the truck bed wanting some attention. Maybe I'll start writing again. Maybe. First: tack the notes from the last draft up to the unpainted wall. Then see what happens. Then see where we are.

So many windows in this little building that with them all open like this the thing feels like a screen porch.

Fifteen-year-old-dog and a seventeen-month-old boy. I'm feeling overfull these last 48 hours or so. Sentimental. Too many adjectives. Too much blunt good weather to get out of the way. Can't help it. Don't know when I'll be back here. The weather won't hold like this forever. They want a freeze by end-of-week. Hell, I'll take that, too. I've got a new woodshed, this year's half-cord stacked neatly into it. I've got coffee.

November. To those of you for whom this is the first you've been able to truly recognize: this is sometimes what it looks like.