Winter

Abutilon at Sunrise

Ah, sunrise. How sweetly the sun gives the flower its first kiss of the day...

Guess again. If the sun is kissy at all, it's around three in the afternoon. Until then, the world is gray and white, thickly shrouded in fog, almost colorless.

Tomorrow is the first day of winter, they say, but I've had enough of winter weather already. The heavy fog traps the particulate matter in the air, and so the Valley, from top to bottom, is under a government "No Burn Day" restriction. That means, to keep warm, we have to run the forced-air furnace.

That means: we don't keep warm. The woodstove would heat the mass of the house; the floor and walls would be warm. The furnace heats only the air, and thus everything we touch is cold.

We need the jet stream to swing south and bring us some nice Gulf of Alaska winds with a spin-in of southern moisture, blow some of this junk out of the Valley, drench the air and get the sooty smog to drop out of the sky.

Also, our turnips need a rain.