Oh Sandy.

Calling it a Frankenstorm's no good, except for the obvious opportunity to say It's alive, it's alive. But it smacks of a failure of imagination, or ownership. Of a We didn't make that. And maybe we didn't. Maybe snowriccanes happened all the time before 1975, and I just wasn't here to see the pre-landfall cable wall-to-wall. Still. Something about it seems to edge, at least, against the broken. Surely this isn't the main idea. Surely of the possible solutions, this one's an outlier. This tugs the bell curve one way or the other. More perfect than The Perfect Storm, I read or heard somewhere. Someplace on one of the internets. A brand new way to have our own names fail us.

All this wind's hurrying our own local fall towards an emptier, grayer November, all the leaves down at once, the yellowed maples pushed and rushed through a week of eighty-degree days followed by this. Piles of leaves in the backyard. The Toad in the piles of leaves. The Toad recollecting his age, two and change, and putting the exclamation point on what had been a quiet weekend with an epic meltdown during a Sunday noon picnic lunch in them selfsame piles of leaves. Now a nap. Mercifully. A nap.

Cold, cold weather coming. Rain and low sky, wind and frost. It's time. I'm ready. I've been ready since I let the forecast start predicting itself back in July and August. I don't do so hot with the heat. It's not my bag. This, boys and girls, cool cats of all ages, is, aside from the apocalyptic portions, more my speed.

We're Back.

It has been so long. Never has it been longer. Two months. And yet, here I am, back—the first rule of weatherblog was always: don't talk about weatherblog.  Reason? A thought experiment. If it rains for five years in the forest, and mainly the whole thing was to practice sentences...

But enough about process. The forecast is never about process. The book people wanted to know if I blogged, and I said I did, but that it was in a kind of qualified way—

So who's reading now? Two more folks, if that many. The rest of you have likely already quit—what good's a forecast that goes on a two-month hiatus? So let's us then return to what this is: a clip reel. Scores and highlights. The poet James Galvin on this question: I live in the South. I do a job. It rains.

We last spoke in August, friends and fans of weather. Since then we've cooled—significantly, I'd have said, but for this last week, when we went 80 degrees three days in a row, enough maybe to germinate the late kale, the late mache, and surely enough to push the September arugula past baby and into full blown leaf if not bloom. That was not a sentence. Neither was that.

The Toad? You want to know of the Toad? He speaks. Sentences. Paragraphs. He has an imaginary friend, Ms. Merrin, of whom he is afraid. She lives, he says, behind the moon. He knows exactly where the moon is. Mornings, he wants to know if it's raining. No, I tell him. We don't get enough rain.

October: We went to the mountains. The next week I left AMR at home, took the Toad back up. I could quit it all, all of it, for a cabin and a woodstove and a place for the now-deaf dog to run within sightline. She'll come back if you wave your arms enough. Up near Whitetop, VA, if the snowriccane hits like they say it will, it'll shift from the 70s to the low 40s. Here, from the 80s to the 50s. All of this coming to a Monday near you. Sorry we broke the planet, I told my freshman comp class. We fucked it up. We drove big cars. I apologize.

What else? Ice in the glass. We're out of coffee. The dog's fed. The windows are open. I bought a hoodie because I wish I was still 22. I look like some asshole trying to look 22. The World Series. College football. November looming. An actual hurricane threatening snow. If there was ever a time to come back—

That'll do for now, I think. I intend to try to be back. The weather stops for no man. Or dog. Or Toad. So the mantra around here: try, one more time, to keep up.