No Rain.

Gray days used to mean rain was in the offing one way or another, and so I'd like to register a kind of general complaint: I am starting to take the drought personally. I still love a good gray day, love how low and heavy and sort of apologetic everything feels, but I'm getting nervous — it's maybe 50 degrees, so it's not cold, not wintry, not really anything. The radar shows various compelling weathers happening to most everybody else all over the country. Here, it's gray. And still. And dry. I kicked some oak leaves around on the way to lunch.

Outside the building: a squirrel, fat for the winter, should winter arrive with any kind of force, licking the top of the iron gate that houses something serious and large and green, something to do with the electricity. I considered coming in and cutting a water bottle in half and filling it and setting it out there — in drought like this, what the hell do the squirrels drink, and where? I keep worrying about how there aren't any cupped leaves with a few tablespoons of water in them anywhere. I mean surely there's some kind of completely straightforward nature show voice-over explanation, like that they walk the half mile down to the pond and drink their fill, but I get worried just the same. Turns gray like this and my money says some kind of internal Darwinian bell goes off inside the squirrel saying Hang on, man, rain's coming, everything will be fine. But it ain't. What's coming is not much. Warmer weather. No rain. Thirsty squirrels.

It's supposed to turn 70 and sunny by Monday and I'll probably find a way to ignore that as a harbinger of a new more fiercely beautiful kind of doom, and instead wax on about one more day in the lawn chairs, a free day, one last glinting example of fall or spring, etc., and for now, I guess, I will love the gray day with the part of me that likes a kind of parentheses, likes a day that basically feels like it did not occur. Maybe, in fact, this isn't anything. Maybe it isn't even weather. This is just the blank canvas. Something else will happen, eventually. I just goddamn wish it would rain.

Pink Pig.

There was a kind of low rumble in the neighborhood this morning, and I sat inside with my coffee, not really worrying about much of anything except my coffee, but that rumble stayed there, stayed there, then got louder, and I figured, hell, just take a look out the window, and it was — the leaf truck! The leaf truck!

Here's the problem: I love an emergency, and I love large yellow machinery, so the leaf truck turning up a week or so early (for its second and final visit of the season) certainly takes us to at least DEFCON 2 or so ("further increase in force readiness, but less than maximum readiness") here at ANYLF world headquarters. Cut, then, to a kind of rake-sprint across my front yard, La Vieja's front yard, and hell, for good measure, a little bit across Phil's front yard, because he's kind enough to mow my side yard when it gets too long for him, and I figured I owed him the favor.

Cold and crisp and blisteringly cloudless and the kind of day one might require for, say, aerial photography, and I'm rakesprinting and suddenly: I am thirteen years old and at some Atlanta Area Boy Scout something — jamboree? exposition? — that was held every year, when we were kids, in and outside of the World Congress Center, in December, I believe, and it was always bitterly cold, like a-hundred-and-thirty-five-degrees-
below-zero cold, and there were two kinds of Scouting exhibitions at this jambosition: the bullshit kind, indoors, and the badass kind, with lashings and whatnot, outdoors. Inside Scouts: worthless. Frigid outdoor Scouts, lashing together ziplines and three-rope bridges and cooking biscuits in cast-iron crock pots? Let's just say that maybe my whole weather-as-competition thing (I used to love to camp in the 33-degree rain, because I thought that was a pretty good way of determining who should live and who should not go camping) started somewhere in this vicinity.

Also: Same time of year: The Pink Pig, a very, very strange holiday tradition on top of the Rich's building in midtown in Atlanta. The Pink Pig is a Pig-shaped roller coaster that somehow equals Christmas. Also very, very cold.

That's what it smelled like out there this morning. Three-rope bridges and The Pink Pig. That kind of winter.

The leaf truck has still not gotten to this side of the street. The dog, overseeing things from the porch, kept looking at me like she knew there was no real emergency.

Lamb Stew.

A deep thick cloud cover to start the day and then: snow. Not of the sort that made me want to find bags of cement to put in the truck bed over the back tires in the hopes I wouldn't go skidding off into the tobacco fields or the parking lots of any of the prefab churches between home and school, but, fans and friends of weather, actual snow, sort of. BBs of snow. Probably several hundred of them, even. At the height of the storm, I could actually hear the snow ticking down on the seven billion sweetgum leaves I'm currently storing on the back patio (Because who knows? I may require them for something).

It is now sunny and nearly 50 degrees, for those of you scoring at home.

One last holdout here at 27244, down at the front right corner of our building: A Japanese Maple gone so red that at first you're not sure what you're looking at. About ten feet tall. Red.

This morning's weather made me want for London, or the version of it, at least, from my two Januarys there, made me want for some tiny pub three blocks off the main road, wood floor and rugs and a coal fire, a lunch of lamb stew and a pint of bitter. Much as I love this place, I seem of late to be wanting other places, too. In an unrelated matter, the timer for the lights on the front of the house seems not to be working, which is good. I need something to obsess about which I also fundamentally misunderstand. Electricity makes the timer work. It must be, then, that the electricity is broken.

Little Clipper.

Which accounts for the cold, the clouds, the prospect of snow in D.C. and maybe snow showers in southern Virginia and yes, of course, the nine-year-old in me wants to wake up tomorrow to three or four inches of snow, but that happens so rarely any more. Used to be the forecast was inherently untrustworthy. We'd go to bed in Atlanta with the news saying six inches, eight, and wake up to sunshine and 50 degrees. Or they'd say rain, maybe a little freezing drizzle, and we'd get the Ice Storm of the Century. Even here in GSO they used to get it wrong, it seems like. It also seems like it used to snow for real here from time to time.

I shouldn't complain. It's unseasonably cool, and we don't get much of that, even. Hat and scarf weather. The dog looking back over her shoulder at me to see if I've noticed that it's chilly.

But my god everything in me could use a snow storm, a free day, a little something unexpected. There was a half-chance of snow in our forecast earlier. Now it's gone. Maybe that's a good sign.

It's winter. We've come through fall and we're into winter. It will, of course, be 70 degrees by the weekend.

Wind Advisory.

The front came through overnight — one one-hundreth of an inch of rain — but left us with what we've got today, a fierce wind out of the north and west at 15-20 mph, with gusts, they say, to 40. Layman's terms? If you spent all weekend piling your leaves at the edge of your yard, as everybody all up and down the dogwalk did, then by now it doesn't matter. Everything's right back where it used to be.

Dogwalk out: Brownie so asleep in her yard, lying in the chill and the sun next to the big oak tree, that for a minute I thought she might be dead. That's Brownie of Brownie & The Colonel fame, a kind of sitcomesque mismatched pair of dogs, a brown mutt (Brownie) and a purebred blue Sheltie that live around the corner behind one of those invisible fences I cannot for any reason bring myself to trust. The Colonel's this little fierce high-pitched matted-down thing. Brownie likes to sleep. Up on a decorative bench, or in the carport, or today, smack out in the middle of the sun, middle of the yard, death-still and barely breathing and, one imagines, as happy as she could ever be.

Dogwalk back: One of the three wise men blown over in somebody's yard, the other two and Mary and Joseph upright and on their tinted plastic knees, waiting for the Big J. I guess the wise man just couldn't take it any more, thought he'd be better off face-down in the grass. Maybe he was just then getting hold of the notion that myrrh is maybe not the best gift to bring to a shower.

Dog with her face into the wind, a nice high trot, bellying through what was left of any pile of leaves she could find, mouth open, tasting the air. Squinting. Dogs love the wind advisory.

Christmas Lights.

Happily overcast most of the day, mid-fifties, the half-scent of something like rain in the air. And rain's actually in the forecast overnight. Light rain, but at this point, I'll take what's offered. Also there's some kind of wind warning for tomorrow, which will mean a long day for the ANYLF staff.

The December Gourmet arrived over the weekend with five or six impossible cookies on the cover, three or four of which I'll probably try on about the fifteenth after I've lost my mind and need some kind of a project. Got the lights up on the house this afternoon, all hung kind of slapdash across the front porch, blue lights around the door in tribute to my grandmother, who has huge blue lights on the front of her house each Christmas. Actual lightbulb-sized blue lights. Growing up, every other Christmas anything I saw anywhere was red and green, or multi-colored. Her lights were always blue and only blue. Blue ornaments on her flocked tree.

I can't get behind the whole actually-divine-son-of-God-in-the-virgin-womb thing, outside of what a genuinely beautiful metaphor some of it can be in the right hands, but I do love Christmas, and just this evening felt myself finally swinging around to it. It was hard getting there this year, but our good friends dropped by this noon with two CDs full of things like Lou Rawls singing White Christmas, Merle Haggard singing some anthem about poverty and how his little girl might not get any presents this year, and the Pogues yelling at each other — an unexpected gift on a gray day and the perfect way to start the season. Lights on the house, then, dog on the porch helping out, the same lights as last year, all carefully put away in the closet and dragged back out once a year, the faulty strands checked light by light, and on top of that I raked the damn yard and blew off the deck: I'm afraid the born-again neighborhood association newsletter people are going to think I'm on their side.

I ain't.

It's a melancholy season, like all good seasons. Happy Xmas to all, and to all a good night.

Season Ends.

Yesterday — November 30 — marked of course the end of the Atlantic Hurricane season. Everybody celebrates or mourns in his or her own way, I guess. Sheet cakes. A quick duck into the bar at TGI Friday's for some appletinis. Somber reflection on the relative water temperatures in given parts of the Gulf of Mexico. Mothballing the planes that fly into the eyes of these things. Putting gingerly away the gridded map available at your local Publix so that you, in the privacy of your thin-skinned home, can track the gods' attempts to wash you clean away.

This ends, then, for now, the live weather remotes with reporters blown sideways and the pop-up radars in the corners of the news and weather channels showing Roberto or Hortence or Felicidad spinning his or her way ashore in Tampa, in Myrtle, in the Yucatan.

If it ever gets cold enough, though, we can replace all that, for the time being, with the weather reporter's ultimate money shot: live from the giant salt pile, snow and ice just starting, stern warnings to motorists to stay off the roads. B-roll of icy interstates. Keep it here for the latest travel conditions, the latest school closings. His Little Ones opens at 10 today. Custodial staff is expected to report to work as normal.

Less Maudlin.

Woke up this morning to a kind of thin high haze and thought oh, hell, once more around, but something shifted over the course of the day, something in the light, I don't know, and it got warmer, and then colder, and now it's the kind of cold that seems to matter, not snow cold, nowhere near, not much of anything, only barely enough for a freeze, but it seems like something, like weather, and I'll take it.

We were in that middle ground, not fall, not winter, not anything. Now we're sliding toward something new.

At least now I know the roses will get hit overnight, the hydrangeas, what's left of the hostas. It's certainly not winter. Not yet. But we have achieved a kind of small shift.

Had the first of the TLK eggnog tonight, a harbinger of something good left out in front of us. Tomorrow the lights up on the front of the house, football I can't quite give a damn about, something big on the grill. Kids in my office this afternoon with real stories. Dog wagging her tail across the comforter. Cats piled up on my goddamn chair.

We'll see.