Time Change.

I'm standing at the sink, working my way back and forth between tonight's dinner and last night's dishes. AMR and the Toad are off and triking their way through the too-early dark. Radio on: news. November news. Election, nor'easter. I squirt the wrong dish soap into the pan, the blue stuff, some major brand instead of the fancyass enviro stuff we normally use, and the smell's wrong—not bad, but wrong, out of place, like a 5 p.m. sunset that first Sunday night of regular time—and I'm at the cabin in Virginia, because that's where we use this soap, and then it's not too many steps to another sink, another time, a later November, Palmolive, green, small bottle, my grandparents' home in Nashville, the big one, the one we all grew up in through all those successive Thanksgiving weekends, and then the condo they fell into later on, never the same, but a fine fake—

What do you want to do with a November that's plenty cool, but arrives with no freeze? I've never had a garden look so good. Arugula. Four kinds of lettuce. Kale coming. Thanksgiving coming. The holidays. All of them. And then the baby. The new baby. Friends and fans of weather, though I know you no longer read, because for so long I no longer wrote, yes, the Toad will have another. Some other amphibian. Chaos. Disorder. Thanksgiving.

Just that one quick moment at the sink. The wrong soap, some strange smell, and then all of it, the whole of my twenties, some other life, another place, all of it back, all at once. And then AMR and the Toad back through the front door, and the roasted veggies roasting, and then bath, and then dinner, and then Sunday, this new life, this same old standard time.