No Promises.

Late February. The Toad's killing us, pitching fits, kicking, hitting, screaming. When he's out of control, he's gone. When he's not, there are flashes of his same sweet self. There's a new kid on the block. Nico. The Timber Wolf. One week old. He barks in his sleep, knew his name before he got here. This morning, walking back from The Toad's school in all this rain, there were hundreds of cardinals and robins. AMR's asleep upstairs with TW. We're about to slide into spring. Even in the brutal cold of the weekend, there was heat in the sun. I make no promises, but the maples are blooming, and nobody's up, and in the thin light from the overhead in the kitchen, I felt like I ought to tell all this to someone.

Those Words.

November. Low clouds. The warm side of the front. The last warm days until the next last warm days. The lettuce keeps pushing, keeps pushing, and we haven't bought salad from the store in six weeks. I'm utterly converted. I may even be converted from tomatoes: though I love them, do they yield like this? Can you eat off tomatoes, in my few square feet, every night? You cannot. Except: AMR, who I love, loves them, and in the grand math of the front yard garden, domestic peace prevails. Perhaps some kind of grand compromise can be achieved. We'll bring together both sides of the aisle.

A meeting, both sacred and profane, with the profane and sacred new book folk today: How lovely this time around. A different experience altogether. Yes, I'm still licking my wounds from last time, but yes, too, it's nice to feel that for one moment a group of people (a whole group!) might come together around the written word—these written words, at that. Or those, more accurately. Those words. Those are the book. These ones are about the low November sky. Only you and I, dear reader(s), come together around such a thing as that.

Cold tomorrow. We edge back up against the freeze in the coming weeks. I have low-key greenhouse-style plans—not to winter us through, but at least to protect that which can be protected from frost. I have a sheet of plastic and a few wooden stakes. We shall see.

Oaks turning. Leaves in all the streets. Sound of the trains more pronounced in autumn than in high summer. I like that. I do, I do.

Time Change.

I'm standing at the sink, working my way back and forth between tonight's dinner and last night's dishes. AMR and the Toad are off and triking their way through the too-early dark. Radio on: news. November news. Election, nor'easter. I squirt the wrong dish soap into the pan, the blue stuff, some major brand instead of the fancyass enviro stuff we normally use, and the smell's wrong—not bad, but wrong, out of place, like a 5 p.m. sunset that first Sunday night of regular time—and I'm at the cabin in Virginia, because that's where we use this soap, and then it's not too many steps to another sink, another time, a later November, Palmolive, green, small bottle, my grandparents' home in Nashville, the big one, the one we all grew up in through all those successive Thanksgiving weekends, and then the condo they fell into later on, never the same, but a fine fake—

What do you want to do with a November that's plenty cool, but arrives with no freeze? I've never had a garden look so good. Arugula. Four kinds of lettuce. Kale coming. Thanksgiving coming. The holidays. All of them. And then the baby. The new baby. Friends and fans of weather, though I know you no longer read, because for so long I no longer wrote, yes, the Toad will have another. Some other amphibian. Chaos. Disorder. Thanksgiving.

Just that one quick moment at the sink. The wrong soap, some strange smell, and then all of it, the whole of my twenties, some other life, another place, all of it back, all at once. And then AMR and the Toad back through the front door, and the roasted veggies roasting, and then bath, and then dinner, and then Sunday, this new life, this same old standard time.

These Questions:

Has the sun just suddenly, all at once, dropped lower in the sky? What are the ethical implications of canceling class so that I'll have time to get home and gird the lettuce against the frost? Do I even remember last year's winter? Am I only ever truly happy in November, when it's all still out in front of us? Should someone speak to the good folks at the fancy grocery about pulling down all those wreaths they already had up in all the checkout lanes yesterday?

Oh Sandy.

Calling it a Frankenstorm's no good, except for the obvious opportunity to say It's alive, it's alive. But it smacks of a failure of imagination, or ownership. Of a We didn't make that. And maybe we didn't. Maybe snowriccanes happened all the time before 1975, and I just wasn't here to see the pre-landfall cable wall-to-wall. Still. Something about it seems to edge, at least, against the broken. Surely this isn't the main idea. Surely of the possible solutions, this one's an outlier. This tugs the bell curve one way or the other. More perfect than The Perfect Storm, I read or heard somewhere. Someplace on one of the internets. A brand new way to have our own names fail us.

All this wind's hurrying our own local fall towards an emptier, grayer November, all the leaves down at once, the yellowed maples pushed and rushed through a week of eighty-degree days followed by this. Piles of leaves in the backyard. The Toad in the piles of leaves. The Toad recollecting his age, two and change, and putting the exclamation point on what had been a quiet weekend with an epic meltdown during a Sunday noon picnic lunch in them selfsame piles of leaves. Now a nap. Mercifully. A nap.

Cold, cold weather coming. Rain and low sky, wind and frost. It's time. I'm ready. I've been ready since I let the forecast start predicting itself back in July and August. I don't do so hot with the heat. It's not my bag. This, boys and girls, cool cats of all ages, is, aside from the apocalyptic portions, more my speed.

We're Back.

It has been so long. Never has it been longer. Two months. And yet, here I am, back—the first rule of weatherblog was always: don't talk about weatherblog.  Reason? A thought experiment. If it rains for five years in the forest, and mainly the whole thing was to practice sentences...

But enough about process. The forecast is never about process. The book people wanted to know if I blogged, and I said I did, but that it was in a kind of qualified way—

So who's reading now? Two more folks, if that many. The rest of you have likely already quit—what good's a forecast that goes on a two-month hiatus? So let's us then return to what this is: a clip reel. Scores and highlights. The poet James Galvin on this question: I live in the South. I do a job. It rains.

We last spoke in August, friends and fans of weather. Since then we've cooled—significantly, I'd have said, but for this last week, when we went 80 degrees three days in a row, enough maybe to germinate the late kale, the late mache, and surely enough to push the September arugula past baby and into full blown leaf if not bloom. That was not a sentence. Neither was that.

The Toad? You want to know of the Toad? He speaks. Sentences. Paragraphs. He has an imaginary friend, Ms. Merrin, of whom he is afraid. She lives, he says, behind the moon. He knows exactly where the moon is. Mornings, he wants to know if it's raining. No, I tell him. We don't get enough rain.

October: We went to the mountains. The next week I left AMR at home, took the Toad back up. I could quit it all, all of it, for a cabin and a woodstove and a place for the now-deaf dog to run within sightline. She'll come back if you wave your arms enough. Up near Whitetop, VA, if the snowriccane hits like they say it will, it'll shift from the 70s to the low 40s. Here, from the 80s to the 50s. All of this coming to a Monday near you. Sorry we broke the planet, I told my freshman comp class. We fucked it up. We drove big cars. I apologize.

What else? Ice in the glass. We're out of coffee. The dog's fed. The windows are open. I bought a hoodie because I wish I was still 22. I look like some asshole trying to look 22. The World Series. College football. November looming. An actual hurricane threatening snow. If there was ever a time to come back—

That'll do for now, I think. I intend to try to be back. The weather stops for no man. Or dog. Or Toad. So the mantra around here: try, one more time, to keep up.

Spider Season.

He's quit napping. The trash cans are still at the bottom of the driveway. The dog tripped several times on her walk this morning. I'm jumpy, sleepy. He's banging things around up there. I beg him to be quiet, lie still, get some rest. He needs it. He loses his shit right around dinnertime on the days he doesn't nap. It's been cloudy for two days. All the rain in the world, judging by the runoff patterns in the bare spots in the lawn, over the weekend we were gone. Again I've been gone. We were 100 degrees, and then we were not. It was July, and now it isn't. Now we're trying for that strange spot between here and fall, the spot where a hurricane comes in and blows all the wind the wrong way for a day or two. It's spider season, JLT used to say, back in the days when I lived uphill from here.

Florida, Again.

Back from the beach always means being comprehensively astonished by the mere fact of green, even if we did go ten 100-degree days, give or take, without rain, give or take. When I was a kid we'd come back to my mother's parched mailbox geraniums; here it's a crabgrass takeover and curling tomatoes. Still: green on green on green, and all this humidity with no breeze to push it anywhere.

We were Boise or Las Vegas to start the month. Now we've come back home, as it were. Ninety degrees. Air you feel you might be able to section off and pocket. North Carolina. That familiar hint of childhood Atlanta. I read in Bill McKibben's Rolling Stone global warming piece that it rained at 109 degrees in Mecca this summer—the hottest-ever recorded downpour. If we're headed there, friends and fans of weather, it'll feel like home, only more so, which will be something nice to consider as the planet chews itself to cinders. Or as we chew it there. Perhaps that's the best way to consider climate change: the winters you remember are gone. The summers you recall are here, but much more brightly lit, the volume turned way up.

Home again, home again. The grass is tall. The weeds are taller. It's too hot to do anything about either. I owe the now-untitled novel on Thursday. This coming Thursday. Six days. There's good air conditioning out here in the shed. Much needed. It vents, of course, into the outside world. Cut and paste your own metaphors here.