Smart Dog

That was going to be the entire post, but as the hours ticked by I found I had more to say.

Fall is here, which in my part of North Carolina typically happens in a stuttered gathering of days, alternately unseasonably warm and gray and cold and wet and thoroughly unpredictable. The weather reports have an almost Kafkaesque, nay, Beckettian sense of irony to them. This year I let myself go and cheerfully bemoan our meteorologists' missed guesses as out and out cruelty, evil dissembling to no end save my individual suffering. One result of Fall's arrival is the annual decanting of the bed covering known in our house as The Chocolate Mousse (or Chocolate Moose, depending on mood and inflection), a synthetic down comforter I bought my wife for Christmas one year. It is so known for it's color and texture, which are respectively deep brown and marvelously, to use my wife's terminology for lack of a more wonderful descriptive, "squishy." The Dog has used her innate genius to find the best place in the house to spend the earlier portions of a cold Fall morning: my side of the bed, beneath the Chocolate Moose, shortly after my own willing evacuation from the spot.

Smart dog.

Fall also means I have brought out my beloved leather bomber jacket. I bought it many years ago, on sale, when I found it, and I have yet to see it's equal since. Everything about it-- color, texture, utility-- I love, to the extent that I usually put it away long after the season has called for it and pull it out much before it's required use. This season the mixture of rain and cold snap upon cold snap has proven my jacket's utility to a great degree, and so far it has only spent a small part of a single day in the trunk of a car, the day's warmth having robbed it of it's usefulness.

The leather jacket does not have a name, which is a bit odd for my household. It's The Leather Jacket. What else would there be to say?

Today the weather is bright and crisp and cold and clear, the low temperature for the morning setting a record at two degrees below freezing, predicted high of sixty-four, and we're nearly there already. Shortly I will be lunching, and then heading out to have my eyes examined, which, with any luck, means I will have a new pair of glasses for the trip we have planned for New York City next month. (Or if not, that will be just fine too.) My point is: my world is beautiful today, and I am grateful for it.