Cold Again.

Wander out there in one layer to start the fire and you'll be sorry and sad and halfway through your second cup of coffee before the notion that yesterday existed at all starts to feel like some kind of brilliant lie, a shiny thing just off the horizon. Yesterday: sixties, more sun than not, the smell of spring, a jacketless dogwalk down the hill and into the 6 pm sunset. This morning pulls itself up right around 30, though, with that white-gray winter sky that says February. It's still February. We might be barely starting to tilt—they want fifties for the end of the weekend into next week, and the daffodils are pushing through the ruined backyard soil—but it's so thoroughly cold again this morning that I caught myself appraising the woodpile, counting seasoned versus green, counting February and March days, wondering about ordering a second half-cord.

And then I put match to my neighbor's manila-foldered medical records, Hefty bags of which he gave to me for the express purpose of destruction via firestarting, and that stove hops to life, and all is, if not alright, then certainly survivable.

No squirrels. Flocks of waxwings two days in a row. Closing in on the end of the second-to-last chapter. A little love affair brewing with the Toad. Pickuped him back and forth to the Harris-Teeter yesterday. He liked that. I liked that. I explained to him about cowboys and foolishness and the general dumbassery of men, and told him to avoid all that as long as he could. He considered that on the way home, then put a lemon in his mouth.

New Order.

Day one of primary caregiving goes like this: the Toad takes not much morning nap, but crashes so hard for his afternoon one that the kitchen gets half-cleaned, CDs I'm no longer allowed to listen to get dug out, the passive voice gets used, and I get to watch a flock of at least 100 cedar waxwings come through the back yard for twenty minutes and denude La Vieja Nueva's holly tree. I went out to get a closer look and there were so many birds roosting and resting in the Downhill Mouse's walnut trees that their shit hitting the ground sounded like fat rain.

The sun was trying to come through earlier, but I think it's given over to whatever weather this is, which is apparently trainwrecking the center of the country and leaving us largely alone. What they get: feet of snow and breathless disaster live-from-the-scening. What we get: clouds and chill.

Coming up on 90 minutes of Toad nap. What a beautiful thing that is. This gets to be regular, why then, forget about the forbidden music, the countertops, the everything but the waxwings: I'll be outside trying to tack on a few more pages. Tune in tomorrow, then, when you'll hear our hero say: Play, Toad, play. Eat, Toad, eat. Sleep, Toad, sleep. Rinse. Repeat.

January Resolution.

A quick evening dogwalk this last day of January offers up a kind of fog-mist hanging up in the streetlights, a damp, clothes-clinging cold, and enough lights wrapped around porches and wreaths still hung in doorways to make me not feel too badly about my own 500 blue lights still strung, if not lit, around my own windows and door. Sorry to have left the last half of last week out in the cold, as it were: We rode the Toad first west over the mountains to Nashville to meet his great-grandparents, and then rode him back east and home again, and all that left precious little time for the weather. The weather stops for no Toad, though, and I can tell you this: The ride out was cold; the ride back was not. Winter westward, then a snap spring and windows down back east, and now, tonight, home again, winter again. With something in the air. As aforementioned. The squirrel man, on his way out of the driveway: If it rains tomorrow, and it's cold like this, it ain't gonna be rain. Amen, squirrel man.

The squirrels are, we think, resolved. Pulling into the driveway tonight, the headlights brightening the building in the back corner there, I was flooded with this enormous relief, plus love for the squirrel man, who was so, so kind, and did not once chide me for my soffitry, or lack thereof. Repetitive noise, repetitive noise. Much of my life is repetitive noise. I do not do so well with repetitive noise. I had begun to dream about the squirrels getting in, chewing my spendy double doors. On the dogwalk I listened for barking dogs.

Cold tonight. Cool tomorrow, with some activity. And then mid-sixties on Wednesday? Can it be true? I don't know for sure that I believe. Highs back where they have been -- mid-forties -- by Thursday and Friday. And there's your forecast for the workweek, friends and fans of weather, and there's your January, as resolved. Small bits of weather. Doesn't have to be much. And it worked: the book drags itself along. Happy new year. Happy January. Happy February. Happy Monday. Now go outside and stand in the quiet and the lees of the stove fire and listen: That absence of sound in the ceiling is what you want, what you have been wanting all along. What comes next? Something. We just don't yet know what.

Enough Already.

All of it: rain, snow, sleet, hail, wind, cloud, clear. Fog. Mist. The steeple through the kitchen window. All of it. And none of it done.

Winter Rain.

This was meant to be snow at one point, but it's rain, and we'll take it. That and two squirrels removed from the building. That and wood cut already for the morning. That and we're pushing eleven and the Toad sleeps and so soon will his father. Let's call that a night, shall we?

Fox Urine.

The squirrel guy said it was snowing in Summerfield this morning. The church ladies over at the daycare say the snow event for later in the week will actually be rain. I've looked at no map and have no outside information and so I'll trust them each, and why not? I left the Toad with the church ladies, and the squirrel guy is about to save my life. If I'll trust the outbuilding and the boy to these people, surely I can trust the weather to them, too.

Though it did have that snow look out there when I first got up—that leaden low gray that makes you hope you've got ingredients enough in the pantry to last a day or two. We had nothing make the ground here. Do pay attention Tuesday into Wednesday—something's going to come out of the sky, they say. We just don't maybe know precisely what it'll be. The church ladies do. We here at the forecast don't. Yet.

Squirrel guy, you say? In Have Yourself A Merry Little Weekend news, I spent Friday afternoon q-tipping fox urine into the outbuilding ceiling (on the advice of said squirrel guy) in the hopes of keeping the squirrel that was digging through the ceiling and into the living space from having total success in that endeavor. Also I blared, day and night, Rock 101 The Rabid Jackal, or whatever the hell they call it. It worked. No squirrels inside. And by the end of today, here's hoping no squirrels at all. The guy showed up in a big panel van painted with cartooned woodland creatures. What's going to happen to my particular beasts is apparently not going to be so cartooned, but the guy says that's how it has to be, and I believe him. I trust him. I actually want to hug him a little, but I'm afraid it might be too soon. I am not the guy who does well with repetitive noises either of the actual or the intellectual variety, and this snugs neatly into both categories. My god I love an expert. He will save us. He will save us all.

Cold out there, friends and fans of seasonality. It's cold and it stays cold. We break forty degrees around here these days, like we did yesterday afternoon, and it feels balmy, feels like we ought to rush out and dogwalk our way around. I'm ready for daffodils, I said to the church ladies this morning. I'm ready for spring, the one of them said. Except it's time for neither of those things, is the thing. I guess we'll have to hang on a little longer.

High Wind.

I think I'm going to say that was a windstorm that pulled through around 3:45 a.m.—had to be the tail of that front that snowed and iced in the mountains and seems to have left us dry here, though I did not get myself out of bed to lay eyewitness to that account. It banged the windows in their panes and it threw things around out there, and there was something in the wind that sounded like sleet, but it did not fully wake the Toad and nothing out on the ground this morning was wet, so there you have it. There was an overnight event apparently without consequence. Or with this consequence: It is cold and freezer-dry again out there. We are cloudless and pale, pale blue. I had weekend projects in mind having to do with outdoors and building repair and etc. If this keeps up I'm going to have to buy a pair of fingerless gloves.

Cold and cold, friends and fans of weather, and getting colder as we head out of one more work week. The fancies on the T and V are already handwringing about a possible snow event early next week. As for me and my kind, I am about done with all of that, though I do feel myself menu-planning for that storm, trying to account for which and what foods will best carry me through that and towards warmer days.

The leaf trucks made their second passes through the neighborhood yesterday, and my back yard is still full of its second falling of leaves. These are the things that get missed in the era of the Toad. These are some of the things, anyway.

Long Winter.

Kindling cut, wood stacked in front of the stove, tarp over the woodpile, ice coming down in the mountains, and the smell of rain out there even though the moon's visible through the clouds. This is a weekday and I am making effort on the weekdays to tell you what the weather is. We're colder. We're damp. We're headed back for winter. It's been dark since about noon. Come on, equinox, goddamnit.