First Day.

Dropped the Toad off at the big church in the back yard: day care 9-1, MWF, on the cheap, with nice church ladies there to smile at him and call him cutiepie and say they sure hoped I wouldn't mind if they spoiled him and etcetera. Feels like a crazy luxury: writing time, bought and paid for. And I'm sorry for the 'ladies' -- if there had been church boys there, too, or churchmen, or what have you, or who, then the forecast would have had that here duly and fully noted. But there were not. There were kind ladies there to take the Toad into their sacred trust. And now the Toad is there, and we are here, staring at each other, not sure what to do. Snipe at each other some. Do the play-by-play of last night's midnight Toad meltdown. Pace the rooms. Write. Watch the clock. Wait for that big bell back there to sing its song, play its one chime.

A little weather advisory for your January Friday: maybe an inch or two of wet snow this evening and overnight, mainly along a line north of Highway Whatever. I never know what highways they mean unless it's the interstate, and it never is. It's always something like Highway 64, and then I always think Highway 64 runs north-south, and I end up spending time trying to figure out what a line north of a north-south line would look like, and by then it's already snowing, so who cares. What the suits and fancies around these parts tend to mean, I've learned, when they say 'along and north of a line...' is that we're likely to see snow here, but down in maybe Pleasant Garden or High Point or whatever else is down there -- Uwharrie? -- they'll get cold rain and some slickening of bridges. So: Along and north of a line marked by the handful of limited-access highway exits of your choosing, look for snow. If you are local to the 2740X WeatherCast, look for snow. If you are not, crack your own windows and lick your own flagpoles. Choose the divining rods that work best for you. Take a guess. Find a highway. Stand north of it. See what happens.

Medium Range.

There's a little cloud off to our far south, but mainly what we're seeing out there is a high still blue sky, a chilly day, though certainly not a cold one. There's heat in that sun even in sock feet on the back porch. Resolution: split kindling the night before. We're on day one of that. Resolution: take the dog outside more. We'll be on day one of that as soon as the morning's work comes to some manner of close. And as if on cue, the dog arrives at the back door, looking in. Resolution: pay attention to which side of the door the dog's on. We'll update progress on that one tomorrow.

The dog has a pretty full winter coat in, which is what amounts to a long-range forecast around these parts, so I'm saying that unless I see my shadow some time soon, we're in for at least six more weeks of winter. We're for sure in for a weekend of it: more than one professional outfit says we won't break 40 Saturday or Sunday. May get a little burst of something through Friday night, may squeeze a little snow out of that. We shall see. All that's a long and longer way off. For now: make sure the curtains and blinds are open on the south and west sides of the house. Let some of that good winter light and heat in. Take from January what it gives us.

Gulf Low.

What we are seeing this morning, friends and fans of weather—and mustn't we all be?—is what I'm going to (probably) wrongly call outflow from a big southern low tracking give or take from coastal Mississippi to coastal whatever else comes next. That's Alabama and Florida, I think, if you'll check your dance cards. The fun and games part of this is that the fancies wanted this thing to hold just a bit further south than it seems to be doing, and the net effect of the northern jog is that we may see a snow shower this evening, and perhaps a dusting on your higher elevations, on your grassy areas. Will we get the live-from-the-salt-pile local news standups? Depends on how much other news we get.

What it means—and that's what we can offer you here at the forecast, dear readers: we make up for in synthesis and analysis what we lack in touch-screen green screens and dopplers on towers out in the yard—is that maybe if you've got the saw out, go on ahead and cut a few extra sticks. There's a little snow forecast for Friday, too. Light a big fire. Let the little wall heater take the edge off while the stove works its way to heat, which is one way to measure: some mornings the stove's enough on its own, and some mornings you need the heater, too, for that first hour. We'll see the sun break through from time to time, as it's trying to do even right now, but mainly this looks like it'll be a socked-in day, a day to start planning dinner at lunchtime.

Winter Light.

What's out there is a kind of low-lying cold. You want a shirt over your shirt if you're going to be chopping wood. Second day of the work week, second fire. The timer just went off on the coffee, so we've been at it for however long. Right now minus four hours. Or three. I'm waiting on the building to heat, pecking at the weather report quietly so as not to disturb the morning naps: the Toad, because he is wee; AMR, because she now carries the flag of the gray death for the rest of us. The squirrels have made it all the way down the eave on the front of the building, and are now at work on projects to the right of the front door. When they fight along the back side, little bits of insulation fall out. As soon as I can hold a drill over my own head and can finish the soffit back there, it'll be time to call in some experts. Some folks with a van and a live trap. Catchy name. Vermin Vamoose. Wild N' Crazy. Some such thing. If only this were like geese, and I could hire a border collie to come in and harrass these things into the next drainage pond. Tall woman in a ranger hat, a quilted vest, a whistle, a bandannaed dog named after somebody famous. Go get 'em, Meryl Streep.

We're still close enough to solstice to where the low sun off to our south is almost under these clouds, which gives a kind of churched light to the whole proceedings out there. It is light and not light all at once.

Happy New.

This is not a resolution. This is just to let you know that I've lit the first fire of the year, that the back yard has that heave-slush that comes after two days of fifty-degree rain and an overnight hard freeze, that the geraniums, in spite of my least efforts, continue to bloom out there on my desk in the building. This is to say that all three of us -- three, that still-oddest of numbers -- came back from Christmas sick, and that we have, on the main, recovered. This is to note that we break the first Monday of 2011 cloudless and pale blue. We expect a high in the forties. We expect dry conditions here for a few days. We may see snow on Friday. From where I sit in the kitchen, I can see the chimney on the shed. From where I sit in the kitchen, I can hear the Toad waking up. It is eleven in the morning. Probably there will be more to say.

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.