Chance Of.

When you get those spitshined blazing leafshot autumn days ten, twelve days in a row, you forget how nice a low gray morning is, you forget how those maples down the street will fire just as brightly against a gunmetal sky, you forget the plain pleasure of overcastness. Overcastedness. Overcast. One of the three, surely, right? Hard to say. Hard to say whether it'll rain or not, too, and though the radar says no, not now, that sky looks like if we got some half-shower, enough to wet the streets and sidewalks, probably nobody should step up to be surprised.

The dog and the Toad line up for the same team: gray morning means sleeping in. For the first time since the time change, the Toad held on until eight. I know real grownups have real schedules. I do. But eight o'clock was nice this morning for us rank amateurs.

The squirrel still lives in the writing shed eaves, his residence a hedge against the possibility that he's a her and that the residence is non-singular. Once we get past the time a fall clutch would have clutched and gone, I'll do the blunt work of eviction. For now, huddle up, little man. I apologize in advance. I'm picking the lesser of two evils. One cannot have a hollering baby beast of his own, it turns out, and evict the possibility of infant squirrels. If they were in here, if they were threatening the actual family, I guess that'd be one thing. If all they're doing is threatening the novel, well, then, that columns itself into a different category.

A visiting gig at the Virginia sibling's puppet show means a short week at my own—and on a morning like this one, that feels hopeful, feels alright. Keep it tuned here, friends and fans of weather. We may see rain tomorrow. From this chair, right now, that feels like something somebody'd want to call in.

Early November.

The weather's flipped back warm again, or mainly warm: you'll want a jacket out there waiting for the school bus, friends and fans of domesticity, of procreation, of bubbling the planet with tiny lunchboxed velour-hoodied pre-Kers, but by noon it should be warm enough to throw the windows wide open and wait for that selfsame bus to trundle them back safely home for a snack of milk and four fig newtons. See how easily we can flash a few years into the future? The Toad hollers upstairs as he heads down for a nap. Squirrels have indeed made a home in the eaves of the writing shed. We're seeing overnight lows in the upper thirties and low forties, highs in the upper sixties to right around seventy. The big maple in the back yard burns yellow. The weather's meant to hold like this through Sunday. It may not be November any longer, but it's—well, it's pretty. You want fancier than that? Try some other increasingly irregular forecast.

The road home from the puppet show the last few nights has seen smoke from leaf fires hanging low in the air, dust from plowed-under tobacco fields hanging low in the air. The time changed, which means sunset rides back west to the Gate City, stars and planets firing away in the clear above the smoke and dust. Getting to be time to look for Venus, for Orion. The moon's been filling this week back from that fingernail rip of a crescent I like so well, and walking out of my office at night I've noticed just how quickly it slides in one direction or the other. I've always known it goes full to new and back again in however many days. I just don't think I've ever quite noticed it three days in a row. Seems a small thing, but it is a thing all the same.

The fire out back should be good by now, should have pushed the chill out of the building, should have made the space ready. There are two separate books I'd rather be working on right now, both worse ideas than the good one that's at the desk but just won't quite go the way I want it to. These are pretty days. They are. They just are not easy ones, or simple. The Toad sleeps. The dog's waiting for me to give up on my own life and take her and hers around the block. I've made a second pot of coffee. The light through all these leaves seems shaped and weighted. These are the things I have to tell you. This is damn near all there is.

Back Again.

The morning after Halloween: candy wrappers and Spiderman masks in the streets. Since then: cleaner, colder. Wednesday and Thursday looked like you'd want November to look like—wet and gray, low sky, early sunsets, hat weather. If someone rang your doorbell and wanted to see November, wanted to see it right away, that would have been what to show them. And we wake up on the first Friday morning of the month to this rinsed-through near-frost, high light blue sky and the tops of the maples already turned and fallen and blowing around in the lawns. Every year I forget that after the turn, the leaves fall top to bottom. Every year they do it again.

What do you want to know? That the weather happens every day, and that the forecast sometimes does not? No good answer that doesn't have the following elements: toad, novel, puppet show, toad, novel, puppet show. Sometimes dog. Sometimes out-of-towners. Sometimes pure laziness. Sometimes exhaustion. Sometimes an admixture of all of these and more.

The Toad is 155 days old.

Cold mornings we use the fire in the living room, I use the stove outside. Squirrels may be living in the eaves of the building. The plan: wear gloves, unscrew some of the soffitry, pull on whatever I find and duck the hell out of the way. That's coming either later on today or to a Saturday near you.

First freeze of the season forecast for tomorrow night. It smells like winter out there. We've shifted. We make a little more coffee than we did in the warmer months. The time changes Sunday night—or we do. It's one of the two.

Weather Watch.

We're having, it seems, October tornadoes. Y'all hunker down out there, please, and more about this tomorrow. Two weeks away and we get seventy overnight degrees on the eve of November. Somebody around here should start paying a little more attention, it seems.

Edging Closer.

Yesterday evening, walking the Toad through the park in the very end of the sunlight, I said to AMR, Thank god today's not Sunday. Why? she said. Because then tomorrow would be Monday, I said, and on Mondays I have to do my job. And now here we are, and it's Sunday, and tomorrow, then, is Monday, as it almost always is, which means looms the job and etcetera, but the weather is so good it turns out I cannot care. I mean, it's there, the workweek is, with all its attendant glory, but ANYLF is reporting live from the slowest front porch there is, and the jays are out here hollering at each other, and I can hear something chewing or rooting or both over in the holly bushes, and I have a brand new pair of bluejeans on that are a little too cool for a person like me but who cares, and the Toad naps upstairs, and even Mendenhall with its trucks banging by sounds correct. Kids down the hill are screaming about the rules and subsets of rules of a game that seems to involve throwing something hard, like a rock, at something else hard, like a piece of corrugated metal roof.


The droughtsmacked trees are starting to turn here, which means next weekend's mountain trip will probably be to a place that's already turned and long since quit, but that's OK, too. Pretty up there with leaves, pretty up there without. The big plans for the rest of the day down here on the Piedmont: wash the dishes, push a rag around the kitchen counters, wait for 4:30ish in the p.m., when there are large hopes for an outbuildinged toad, some AM radio, a Braves playoff game. I got the pansies in the ground this week. I did a little weeding. I wrote more days than not. The facts of the case are these, and they are undisputed.

78 degrees on the front porch. No clouds. Not enough breeze to say breeze, but the humidity feels single-digited, so we're cool. Not chilly. A little warm, even, over the top of the cool. But cool. And in the evenings—in the evenings, if you don't yet want a hat, it's simple enough to imagine how it'll be that way soon enough. We are having autumn. We are having front porch weather. There is really, friends and fans of weather, only the front porch. Everybody around here seems to think so, anyway.

Fundamentals, Fundamentals.

Here is an October evening: up late watching the Braves lose a game they're bound to lose, a wee bit of ice in a wee glass, no conferences scheduled puppetshowward tomorrow, the windows open—and oh, by the way, we're now firmly in that kind of fall wherein if you leave the windows open at night, you'll cool off, and if you leave them open in the day, you'll warm back up. Blanket weather. Damaged sentence weather. Heavy shirt weather, but not any longer flannel weather. That was earlier this week. This morning it was warm in the sun for the first time in days. Tuesday and Wednesday were Novemberish. Today was Septemberish—and this is good, since even though it is now October, we had no September to speak of, and we will take it wherever it is.

There is SanFran's rail-thin Lincecum striking out his twelfth Brave. Here is the place where it gets easier to hope less.

Hoping less: this is the essence of baseball. I love other sports—hell, I love most sports—but there is nothing like 162 games to explain, in full and without question, what heartbreak looks like across a landscape and a timeline. Thirtyish cities take six months to give in to the inevitable. Pitchers and catchers report at the end of February. We look good for next year. There is always, friends and fans of weather and of baseball, next year.

It's dry out there, and cool. And it will be for a time. We'll see eighties, but it won't much matter. It'll still feel like fall. Cut that TV or radio on, tune in to a game, and it'll feel like fall there, too. I used the woodstove out in the writing shed earlier this week, more to check to make sure it still worked than anything else. I won't need it again for a week or so, but now I know, and, as they say in baseball, now you're ready, Perry. Now you're ready. Keep your head in. Be a hitter. Here we go, now. Here we go.

Chilly Nights.

It's turned cold. Except that's not true: it's turned cool, and it was so hot for so long that it seems cold. The evening dogwalk with the Toad meant a hat for him, a hat for me. The house is cold. Or cool. It's 67 in here. It was 64 this morning, upstairs and down. It's only two or three degrees warmer than we keep it in January. I will not turn the heat on. I will not turn the heat on. I will not turn the heat on. (But I will happily use the woodstove in the writing shed.) We landed in the forties overnight. We're in the forties now. TWC wants us right at 40 for the overnight low tonight. Which means somebody's bound to see 39. Thirty-nine. Say it with me, friends and fans of weather, or say it at your convenience. Doesn't matter. We have shifted, have tilted past the edge, have sailed, finally, past that point beyond which there be dragons. I have inventoried the flannel. I have found the hats. It is fall.

Someone in the neighborhood pulled our emptied trash cans off the street and put them back in the driveway where they belong. When I was a teenager and slept past one on Sundays, my dad would mow the lawn to prove a point. Didn't work then, won't work now. Though dear sweet baby Jesus firing up an old green Lawn Boy do I remember the sound of my having lost the battle, the smell of me figuring out if I could still win the war.

I wrote this morning. I wrote yesterday morning. Shocking what that will do for making one feel like one writes.

Seasons Change.

Autumn arrives, all at once and in full—I've been in long sleeves since Friday, did actual work in the actual outside in those same long sleeves today—we were so hot for so long I didn't quite believe it would ever come, and surely didn't believe it would arrive like this, seemingly to stay. Maybe we saw seventy today. Maybe we'll see it tomorrow. We're dropping hard through the sixties and fifties right now, are trying for the forties both of the next two nights and most of the next ten, say the fancies. I don't recall the season ever shifting here exactly like this, so all-at-once like this. I love it. I'll take it. There was a bagpiper down in the park on Friday morning. It rained like all hell Wednesday night. We put the end of the subfloor in the shed on Saturday afternoon. These are the things that have happened. That, and the weather changed. Maybe for good. We can only hope.

Trash piled by the curb. Ice in the glass. Coffee made for the morning. Chicken chili for dinner. Happy dog, quiet cats, sleeping Toad. Braves, impossibly, in the playoffs. Football season. The outside edging possibility of woodstove season. Chance of rain. Chance of all else.