good god maude (this weather's acting odd)

It snowed! Twice! It's October! What?

It snowed so much on Sunday night that driving it looked like the road had been overlain by a space screensaver - tiny white dots flying at my windshield. Snow, rain, and wintry mix. Wet feet. Pretty gross. Not October, not at all. Mom claims she can't remember any October snow like this, tho the news contradicts her and says it's happened about 5 times since 1960. So I guess can't remember is still accurate. But it happened. Today is back to much more normal, as should the rest of the week be. it's in the 50s, sunny, and the leaves are drifting lazily down to earth. I can't inhale as much as I'd like to because I think I bruised or cracked a rib the other day.

In other news, I'm moving to the city. (Day) Job or no, I signed a lease. So I'll be forced to hit the temping hard and be creative. I have two roommates. I need one more. Hopefully they'll finish fixing the place up *soon* and the weather will stay nice to show it.

The frost is on the pumpkin...

It's in the 30s tonight, and it's supposed to be chilly days all week. We're really moving through October. Matt and I went to the Topsfield Fair and the ever-delightful Agawam Diner on Rte 1 & 133 in Rowley, MA on Columbus Day. The day was clear and glorious. Sadly, I didn't bring my camera. Animals and blue skies and the most picturesque New England Diner, where people come in with whitewash on their pants and the old men really do ask the waitresses to marry them every day, but the waitresses are engaged to the rookie town cops and the banana cream pie is just one of a myriad.

Pale September (retrospectively)

Soon, I'll also post pictures from my solo trip to Amherst to see farms, foliage, and the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

October at the Corner of Thayer and Waterman

I put the comforter on my bed the other night, and was cold outside with a jacket, hands in my jeans. It's October, and I'm not moving to New York quite yet, my attempts thwarted by reality and human resources. It's October and I'm in Providence, sitting in the Sci-Li, pretending to be back. It's October and there's nothing they can do about my fixed-term loan, it went through Ruth, through the Corporation, official and approved. October and there are leaves on the trees and I want to be decorating a cottage somewhere, with a pumpkin on the stoop, taking a dog on a walk through a blanket of crunching leaves. October, for red houses, brown sweaters, a wish to be back in time for a guilt-free cigarette and different life. Instead I'm at the Sci-Li, pretending it's 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006. Unfathomable Octobers past. Catastrophes and suffering and unimaginable love. Simplicity I never acknowledged.

Fall in New England

(written by my friend Heather on her Live Journal - simple, but I liked it, and felt it.)

Aw early fall. The last remnants of the summer's raspberries, the last few roof and stoop nights, the approaching dusk. Breaking out the hoodies and leggings, cider and pumpkin pie, foliage and apple picking. Tomato season, kale season, squash season.

This time of year, more than any other, always feels like a new beginning. This year is no different.

It is very possible that September is my favorite month.

Tags: fall, food, september

Current Music: okay, I am listening to Jewel. what.

Chill

Today felt cold! Actually cold! Well... okay, I'll qualify that. I was fine outside walking through Boston (another interview) in a dress, leggings, tall leather boots, and a jacket. But now, inside, changed and in socks, my toes are holding a bit of a chill. It's supposed to hang around 60 tomorrow, too.

Yesterday and the day before, it was Indian Summer, in the 70s, with golden sun filtering through mostly green leaves. On Monday morning, I went to a job interview, then strolled down to the Public Garden. Knowing I might be leaving for New York (for a job) has made me appreciate Boston's beauty - the openness, the gardens that shamelessly ape those of London, with formal circles of roses and small, fanning palms. I sat watching old men, mothers, babies, students, and dogs - especially one squirrel-obsessed mutt named ralph. I felt like a grownup impostor in my brand-new suit, but the sun was warm and the breeze was nice.

Yesterday was even better. I took a book and my water bottle and went to the duck pond in Wellesley. It's different now from when I was a child - fewer fences, and the paths have been allowed to grow in some, narrower and wild. Part of the effort for the natural includes a ban on feeding. Although the adult, rational environmentalist in me is glad for the ducks and geese, I viscerally miss bringing stale heels to lure the quackers. It seems like there are fewer of them, now, though it might just be that they don't come out to the human areas as much.  I walked around to the back, and sat on the stone overlook, watching the ducks and the sun in the trees. Meditating, but with worse posture. Afterwards, I climbed my favorite tree, nestled in the lower limbs, and read a few pages. A small child (too small for the tree) wanted to come up and climb, but her father said, "There's already somebody in that tree; let's go find some duckies." What a good afternoon. Jeans and a sweater and sneakers and bark. The way life's meant to be.

Fall! Mmmm.... crispy

It's September! My favorite time of the year. An ode to crispness: apple-picking (though this year I'll be smart and not saddle my boyfriend with it - he is, after all, allergic to apples), stiff breezes, and orange leaves. Even though I'm not in school anymore, I still think of it as the real start of the year, the time for a new lease on life. Probably that's part having teachers for parents, part my secret inner Jew. Today is a beautiful day - in the sixties, fluffy white clouds, sweater and jeans weather. I just got back from an extended lunch outdoors, and have an urge to put on one more layer and go on a tramp through some conservation ground. I don't see Labor Day as the last gasp of summer - it's the beginning of short, precious, golden autumn.

Funny, even though my life has very little definition now, except for that of emailed resumes (and an interview next week!), the change in the weather still makes me new.

Also, I finally figured out my novel.

Haiku

Blow, autumnal wind,

clearing away this season's

dumb humidity.

Funerary Rain

As the super media coverage no doubt has informed you, Ted Kennedy died last week. I'm quite done with the coverage now, thankyouverymuch, but I was very attached to the Senator. He and Senator Kerry are the only ones I've had, unless you count Jack Reed, Linc Chafee, and Sheldon Whitehouse from my time in RI. But I've always been an MA registered voter, so really, they're it.

Thursday night, I got in line (along with 20,000 other people) to walk by his coffin and pay my respects to his family (all of whom were very gracious, shaking most of the hands that passed their way). When I got there, it was the most gorgeous weather of the summer - about 72, and a clear sky with puffy clouds and a nice stiff breeze - great sailing weather, as it had been the day before. Just what he would have loved. By the time we got in at 8:15 to see him, it was windy and autumnally cold. A change in the weather was nigh.

At least, sort of nigh. I spent Friday at Canobie Lake in New Hampshire with family, and after dinner time, it got COLD and started to pour. We were in line for our favorite old coaster, the Yankee Cannonball, and despite some internal grumblings, we got on. The cold rain pelted at my eyes as we went up the first hill, obscuring my sight. As the 80 year old coaster rounded the corners, we all pretty much thought we were going to die. The moral: don't trust a 16-year-old to correctly gauge when it's time to shut the coaster down for safety. Anyway, the rain began Friday night. Just in time for the funeral - thankfully, not mine.

Saturday morning, my mother woke me up so I wouldn't miss the funeral. Yes, we're that kind of family. Boston was gray and streaming. Dignitaries bustled in in a forest of black umbrellas. What is it about a funeral that tempts rain? It just feels right. I don't know whether it was relief or painful incongruity to the family, but when they buried him at Arlington, it was the pleasant end to a sunny day in Virginia. There should be some message or significance in that, but my brain's too fried to come up with it.

Pictures

Oh, and one of these days I'll have weather pictures. Foliage will be a good time for that.

Cool

Tonight is glorious. After work, I blasted down Route 2 from Somerville to 128. The road is smooth, sweet, and fast. I put both my oversized coupe windows down. My hair (short as it is) was blowing around my head, and the air was cool, with the occasional speckle of moisture. The speed and cool continued down 128 (until 3 exits from home, when construction slowed me, heated and scented the air). For the first time in a while, my typing is impeded by cold fingers - and not because of AC! Because I'm 24 going on 800, I can feel the changes in my elbows and knees.

The past couple of days were cool, too. Yesterday and today, I was in New Hampshire visiting family. Even "hot" was cooler than the 95 and humid we've been having here. Their house, a log cabin, is very well insulated, so it's pleasant inside no matter what. There were ceiling fans, a lake, and cool, breezy nights. Today, the weather all over New England cooled. Long pants! And it's supposed to be fall-like (autumnal, even :-P) through the week. I love September, so despite my desire to have, oh, you know, a life direction before the change of seasons, I am happy about these changes.

This is the story of the hurricane... that never came

I was deeply disappointed this weekend at the non-appearance of Hurricane Bill. Sure, this summer has been rainier, grosser, and colder than most other summers in recorded history, but we have yet to have a really good, hot, pouring, thunder and lightning, wind-a-blowin' storm - the kind that makes you sit on the front porch at midnight because just watching it isn't enough - you have to smell it, too. I love rumbles and bolts... especially if I am safe and protected, which, for everybody who's about to call me a water-hating wuss, includes being able to run outside in the rain, but having a house to dash into. 

This has been a weird non-summer in so many ways. For one, I've been unemployed since I quit school in April, so I really feel like my sunny summer was in April and May while I was living in Providence, and the rest has been a sort of quasi-summer unpaid internship, cold, rainy, bad things happening (deaths and a summer-stultifying car accident), living at home summer hangover. Today I totally screwed up and missed a baseball game I was supposed to go to, which would have been something nice in the actual-summer vein. I think we just had a little cloudburst - I looked outside and my car is wet - but nothing satisfying. That pretty much sums it up. Blah.

I'm not alone

The Massachusetts Historical society is helping John Quincy Adams to tweet from beyond the grave. Here http://twitter.com/JQAdams_MHS, you can sign up to get daily tweets from his 1809 journals. One thing that struck me looking at them was how often he uses the words like, "fog," "fair day," and "fine wind" - he, too, measured his life by the weather. Granted, he was on a boat. But still. One of my favorites: "8/10/1809: Squally Night and rainy Morning. Saw a Ship. Lat: 43-49. Long: 56-30. Read Plutarch's life of Romulus. http://is.gd/284Kl (map)"

Thighs

This may not happen to the thinner, or to the hirsute, but the worst thing on a day like this (hot like yesterday, did you need to ask?) is the Walking Thigh Rub. The Rub can be defeated by wearing Bermuda shorts (may the Lord of Shorts be praised for their resurgence). Sometimes, however, it just seems too hot even to wear shorts. Wearing a skirt sounds like a good idea. By and large, it is - unless, of course, your thighs are stuck together, forcing you to a) let them rub together, stuck like you're holding a dime, or b) walk like a cowboy. If I'm alone, b) is always the answer. In front of the plate glass windows of the public library... I was awfully glad to get inside and let the AC sort things out.

The air in summer

Today is the hottest day of the summer. Only the second day over 90 degrees since May. It's 95 degrees out, so hot you almost don't notice the humidity. I have an internship in a hermetically sealed box - the room I'm in has one high window, six feet wide and one foot tall, right by the ceiling. The air in here is thin, and all I can see is pale blue sky, with clouds just peeking in at the edges of the window. It's cool in here - sweater cool, enough to rescue my iPod, too hot to touch and ominously dark at the screen from charging in my car at lunchtime. The air in here is sleek and slithery; you don't know it's there until it stays.

When I walked outside at lunchtime, I could feel the halo of cold around my arms and legs, but only for a moment. The heat and sunshine muffled me like a thick down quilt. The air was physical. In the first minute, it felt comfortable and safe, a relief, like inside was outside and outside was in. I thought of how raw the air is in winter, and how much I would miss this warmth when it was gone. I tucked the air around me, under me. Like a heavy quilt, however, once I got a little warm inside it, I wanted to kick it off and breathe again. The air today is so thick, I found myself breathing with my mouth open, heaving my chest, thinking today would be a nice day for the alternating rescues of heated sand and cold salt water at the beach. Instead, I went back into the office.

Introduction - Whatever the Weather

Hi. I'm Kate. I live in Massachusetts, and this blog is part of my quarter-life crisis. One of the reasons I've never been a great diarist or blogger is that I don't always have something to write about. Either that, or I have far too much to write about and it degenerates into something sloppy and painful to witness. The past few days, I've been looking for something. A blog. A goal. I admit it, it's because I'm 24, underemployed, saw Julie and Julia and am easily influenced. Today, I decided. From now on, every day (or as many days as I get the fancy - blogging's kind of like exercise), I will write on the weather. Not, meteorology or global warming or anything like that - just my impression of the weather that day. This being New England, I should have a lot to write about.