Bigger news than the Presidency
Today’s forecast calls for snow starting this afternoon and running through Tuesday, then again for Friday and Saturday. Yippee 
It’s two or three weeks earlier than average, but it seems much earlier than that. Already the weather we had that passed for summer is in the distant past. Autumn, while admittedly on the mild side, started early and never showed much enthusiasm.
Gray and wet is all I remember. Evidence supporting that impression is on my coat rack. My raincoat is front-and-center. My leather between-seasons jacket is still in the closet, but my winter coat came out on Friday.
No frost until last week, when we got a hard freeze instead. Then, as Gordon Lightfoot sang, the gales of November came early. On the other hand, it blew hard enough over the past several days to punch some holes in the cloud cover.
The trees that drop their leaves at the first sign of chill did so weeks ago. For the last month or so, we had a strange combination of bare and green trees. The freeze on Wednesday turned the rest of them. The gales blew them all away.
Winter, it seems, is here.
One bright spot, is that Web Boy is considering wintering over here. Apparently, for the past three years, he’s returned home to Long Island for the winter. This year he had been thinking about Key West. Then, out of the blue, he said he found an apartment he liked on the landward side of Beach Ave.
I did not try to talk him out of it, although I think he’s fucking nuts to trade palm trees for ice and gales. Instead, I told him the lake can be hauntingly beautiful through the winter, (if cold, angry and desolate is your thing) and when he complained of having to go to the liquor store for boxes, I offered use of my bankers boxes.
One of the afflictions we share is Reynaud’s Syndrome, a spasmodic vasoconstriction on exposure to cold—the cold hands/warm heart thing gone madly out of control. I find myself, well, a part of myself, rising to the prospect of making house calls to Beach Ave to personally deliver a bit of extra body heat.
Now I’m thinking that wintering over in R-town might be nice even if I complain the summers are too cold. The other night I thought a snowball fight might be kinda fun and even entertained the thought of tobogganing. Yikes!
