Steinbeck Eeyore.

Heard this evening, walking home, a tall skinny hooded-sweatshirt-wearing twentyish-year-old guy say to his dog, a sort of black wirehaired tiny mutted something, Come on, Steinbeck.

And this is, word-for-word and letter-for-letter, the sign out front of the First Baptist Church of Whitsett on Highway 70 between here and the puppet show:

OUR BROTHER DENNIS
IS OK
AND ARMANTI EEYORE
IS ON THE WAY

In weather, it was warm and did not rain. In everything else, it was as you see above.

Slightly Woozy.

The kids out at the puppet show seemed sunstruck, and, hell, I guess I was, too: walked the long way across the quad once the puppeteering was done, rode the long way home with the windows all down in the truck, sat on the porch with the dog until that seemed untenable, seemed too still and static, then walked her through the last of the day. That rain took down most of the early trees—those phosphorescent yellows—so what's now first in line, or most in line, are the reds, the oranges, the near-pinks. Autumn, dammit. Full force, but never all at once.

Rain tally: 1.7 inches. Water in the basement, and a little water in the writing shed, but that's ok—it came in out there through a door that soon enough won't be a door any more. This is an advertisement, friends and fans of renovation, for laziness masquerading as vigilance—wait ten months to do a project you swore would be done in six, and you'll know where the water comes in and where it doesn't. You'll know which doors to window over.

Oh, seventy degrees and leaves everywhere and the blue sky aftermath of a hard rain and heat-drunk kids reading Kevin Wilson's magnificent magnificent stories. A body could do much worse than what today handed out.

Duck Weather.

Folks—friends and fans of graphical representation of what's coming our way—we haven't done this in a while, so feast your eyes on what's bubbling ANYLFward from the Gulf and Gulf states:


And here, worders: this from the fancies at NOAA, capital-letter excited, as always, about the goings-on:

RAIN WILL BECOME WIDESPREAD ACROSS CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA LATE TODAY AND CONTINUE THROUGH TONIGHT. NO FLOODING IS EXPECTED...BUT RAINFALL AMOUNTS ARE LIKELY TO EXCEED ONE INCH...ESPECIALLY WEST OF INTERSTATE 95. AS SUCH...DRIVING CONDITIONS COULD BE HAZARDOUS TONIGHT DUE TO STANDING WATER AND REDUCED VISIBILITY.

What we're experiencing now is what I'm not going to be afraid to call a precursor. Mist. Fog. Yellow leaves falling out of the backyard maple. What we'll have later on is what I'm now remembering my mother used to call Duck Weather. It'd be raining hard, and it'd be coldish, and we kids would be whining about the grave injustice of having to play inside, and she'd say how happy the ducks must be out there, and that would somehow satisfy us, at least in part. I can't say why. All I can say is that I can remember standing there, looking out through those sliding doors on Goodfellows Road, thinking about all the happy ducks.

Ornithological note: We didn't have any ducks anywhere near us. None. Nobody ever raised that argument, though, that I can recall.

Low Clouds.

Some manner of fog rolling in out front of whatever rain the fancies want to give us tomorrow—and then we're supposed to aim for warm, for mid-seventies, through the end of the week. Good for insulationless writing sheds. Good, sort of, for in-ground pansies. Good for the ferns hanging on one more week.

Somehow, not an easy day. That gray low-hanging cloud cover took up residence inside as well as out. At the dump, the guy looked into the back of my truck, looked at all the drywall, said, What you got in there? Drywall, I said.

Ceiling Down.

209 square feet of shed ceiling are now in the bed of the truck—and so it begins, friends and fans of foolhardy holiday-season renovation. The new writing shed. Writing Shed East. Not that I haven't been shedded the whole time, but now that we've priced windows, doors, siding, PVC board, and various other fancy shite, and now that we've—I've—pulled the ceiling off the ceiling, the writing shed redux, the writing shed at 709, begins.

Good news: no indication of water intrusion in the soon-to-be-vaulted ceiling. Or the now-vaulted ceiling. The rain stays out. I figured you were wondering. Now you needn't.

When I was not thirty-x years old, by the by, spending all day on a ladder yanking down ceiling wasn't so much to think about.

And a side note: this is, as all things are, all about the weather. I'm putting the desk in the yard on the days I work the shed. Desk already back in. Tomorrow: to the dump, then to the desk. This is the grand experiment: can you renovate a room and work in it at the same time? Oh, hell, maybe there are far grander experiments. This is the plain old experiment I offer up these next few weeks.

Warm Days.

Big wind, early nightfalls—dog in the wind down the hill and back up the other side, our little neighborhood lit in the evenings front porch by front porch, glow riding out, too, from inside, past all those families with all those pictures lined up on all those mantles. You don't see people much on the evening dogwalk—maybe they're all sitting down to earlier dinners than we can abide here at 709—just their empty front porches, empty front rooms. Signs of life: rakes in the yards, strollers on porches, coats and leashes hung on pegs.

The leaves are starting to accumulate in the gutters, along the curbs.

Looks like maybe a little more storm here in the early part of the day, maybe a little more storm as we ride into the afternoon—the radar's trying to fill in, but that front's sliding hard toward us, too, and trying to get past. Tomorrow: sun. Cooler. And I'd say less like an April storm, except that yesterday, in one parking lot or another, that warm wet wind mixing with the smell of the maples turned and the oaks turning, I recognized, powerfully, the smell of standing out in the cul-de-sac in front of my grandparents' old house at Thanksgiving, inventing one more time some way of playing football with only three kids. So we must not be too far afield here, friends and fans of seasons swinging back and forth. This must be normal. Or at least regular. Common. This is a not-uncommon way of riding through fall.

Actual Forecast.

I've been out of sorts -- did not know it was supposed to rain so soon today. And I feel like I've been checking the weather, too, but maybe that information, along with most of the rest of the information about everything else, is sliding out of the pan. Or at least some of it is: I'm not, for instance, surprised by today's temperature, which is a little like a cup of coffee left on the counter half the morning. Just by the rain. And just by the earliness of it. That's all.

Our big maple out the back window here is starting to turn.

Horse, getting back on the: showery and mid-seventies today. Stormy and showery and mid-seventies tomorrow. Some sharp thing comes through Saturday afternoon and evening and gives us, for Sunday, something less like this, more like crispness. And folks, as we head into your work week, it looks like we'll see high pressure build back in over the region, giving us highs in the sixties and lows in the forties. Just gorgeous weather on tap for us here in the Triad through the early part of next week.

See? Doesn't that feel better?

Fall Break.

The weather stops for no blog. Since we last broadcast from this space: winter, breaking gently back towards today's near-Indian-summer conditions. Hell of a way to come down off the mountain, but it had be done. You cannot live at or on vacation forever.

What you can do, though, over the course of a handful of internetless days: put the dog on Bluff Mountain, on Whitetop Mountain, on Mount Rogers. Hang onto her while she stops dead still, barks at a huge flushed deer (thirty hands high, at least), vibrates, begs you to let her run to all the parts of southwest Virginia at once. Thirteen years old, my ass: the old lady's maybe a step slower on average, but now I think it's only because she's keeping everything extra in store for that one next time when I won't see the deer before she does, when she'll get that quick first step, when she'll be gone and gone again like the old days, tennish years ago now, when we'd be out at the lake and some branch would snap and she'd be vanished, three long bounds and over some little rise, and it'd be forty minutes before she'd come dragassing back, bellying along the ground and sporting a torn ear, a tongue a half-mile long and covered in dirt, her whole self so utterly, primally happy she didn't give a damn what I yelled at her.

Snow that first night up there. Wood stove pumping away, getting the little cinder-block cabin nearly warm. Snow on the mountain the next day like it'd been scoured on: icicles, I'd want to call them, if they hadn't been snow, sticking off the Appalachian Trail markers at hard ninety degree angles, four and five inches long. No snow on the one side, and those beards of snow right off the other. All the low grasses that way, too. It must have been one hell of a wind up there. I've never seen snow stick on anything sideways before.

Dog in the snow like she was home.

Back 27401-ward, on the porch: joggers with flashlights, dogs barking, cars pulling through the intersection, motors, mowers, trains. Had got used to quiet. Now to get used to here again.

On vacation: perhaps I could live that way forever. I'd want a little easier access to a thing like a fresh Brussels sprout, or really just a grocery store in general, but give me some way to every now and then make a meal that's not a one-potter, and I'll sell everything but the wife and dog and my ten fleece hats, and that will do me.

When we were kids, none of us understood the way my mom got when we'd first be able to see or smell the ocean on our trips down past St. Augustine every year. I know now. Maybe I've said this before. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Children, gather round. Listen to your old man tell this story. Twelve years up there in Grayson. Every damn one of them with the dog. Muscle memory. Reflex. Driving up that road to the state park, or the sweetrot smell of the leaves off the back porch of this little beat-up four-room rental: what to say other than I already know how much space there is between this fall break and the next one?