The wind has stopped. Today is cold but sunny. I went to the deck to fill the bird feeders and noticed the table had been blown as had all the chairs. They were flush against the deck rail, and the chairs were lined up in a row. The whole deck is covered in leaves and pine needles. I checked the yard but only one small limb didn’t survive the wind which reached 60 miles per hour. Some parts of the cape had snow but we had all rain. It was a mighty storm.

My guys are here to close down the deck. Soon it will resemble a deserted house with the furniture all covered. All the candles are off the tree limbs, the umbrellas closed and covered and the clay pots put away. The only things left are the bird feeders swinging from the branches. This is one of the sad days, the day I start to hunker down, the day I admit that winter is coming.

I don’t remember complaining about the weather when I was a kid. It was just part of the day and had to be tolerated. My mother made sure we dressed accordingly. If left to our own devices, we would have gotten soaked or frozen to death. Nothing is worse than wearing pounds of clothing during the winter. I never admitted to being cold even if my lips were blue.

Mittens and socks have a lot in common. Both cover digits and both seem to get misplaced, lost. Even now I have one sock downstairs on the washing machine waiting for its mate. I’m hoping it will appear when next I do laundry. Mittens too seemed to get lost one at a time, never in pairs. I didn’t ever understand that. The mittens were always together either on my hands, in my pockets or up my sleeves in my coat hanging in the cloak room. Maybe it was a borrower or a mitten elf or some creature from a different dimension. I had no explanation and my mother was never happy when a mitten went lost. By the middle of the winter, we were wearing unmatched mittens, but that was no big deal to us. At least our hands were warm until the next one disappeared.