The shades flapped a few times last night, but it wasn't until about five a.m. that the cold front announced its arrival by rattling the bedroom shades and making the bedroom door sway back and forth before it slammed shut, which set off the dog.

I emerged from the garage to an iron-grey cloud covering and enough leaves scattered in the air by the errant wind to remind me of the lines from "A Visit from St. Nicholas":

"...As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky..."

It's so nice to be able to see when driving to work in the morning. The sun rises so much later here—north of New York even during DST the sun is up by 5 a.m—it's pitch dark at 6 a.m. during Daylight Savings except for a few hours around the summer solstice, and it's so tiresome to drive to work in the dark; you feel like you should still be in bed asleep, and on rainy mornings it's a flat nightmare. Overhead the clouds were in ever-changing patterns: like the mottled sides of fish swimming by, or ridged like those photos you see of the Sahara sands after a windstorm, or convoluted like the coiled patterns of paint in water, then finally pushed away by the time I reached the parking lot at work at seven.

It seems the trees have changed overnight; I was bemoaning last week how few of them had started shifting color save for the one red tree in our backyard and its companion next door in the Robinsons' yard and the few yellow leaves elsewhere. Now there are few trees that haven't been touched by autumn's paintbrush and there are amazingly bright patches even in early-morning light: the little maples around the mostly deserted shopping center near Cumberland Mall and what's left of the maples on the other side of the mall, and one huge maple in the apartment complex on the access road that is the last leg of my route to work, glowing nearly pumpkin orange for three quarters of its softball-round growth of branches.

It's supposed to be in the thirties tonight and the temp had already dropped ten degrees from six o'clock, when it was 60°F. Now it's inched up one degree, but isn't supposed to go past 57 (or 63, depending on what weather forecast you listen to). We may have to put the heat on tonight!

Labels: autumn, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:39:00 AM

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