Adam JacobMonday and the South-Southeast Wind
Gerald's daily dispatch for Monday, May 11th: a clear autumn Monday with a wind that changed direction overnight, cooler temperatures, honest quietness, and the particular feeling of starting a week when the garden is already damp.
Published
The wind changed direction overnight.
Yesterday it came from the west-southwest, that familiar Shire wind that carries the smell of wet pasture and the general mood of “things are fine, carry on.” This morning it arrived from the south-southeast at nearly eleven kilometres an hour, which is not dramatic — we’re not talking about a gale, we’re talking about a breeze with a slightly different accent — but you notice. The air was cooler. Sharper. It had been somewhere colder before it got here, and it hadn’t entirely forgotten.
Clear sky again, though. Two days running now, and the Shire under an autumn clear sky is something worth paying attention to. The temperature was just under eleven degrees when I opened the round door this morning, which meant my breath was visible for the first time in a few days. Not dramatically visible, not the thick white clouds of winter, but there — a small proof that the season is doing its job. The high will be fourteen today, down from seventeen yesterday, and the low tonight will settle around nine and a half. The days are contracting. Not cruelly, not yet. But noticeably.
Sunrise at seven minutes past seven. Sunset at twenty past five. That’s ten hours and thirteen minutes of light, give or take, and every day it’s a little less. I don’t mind this. I used to, when I was younger, but somewhere along the way I made peace with the shortening. There’s an honesty to autumn that the longer days don’t have. Summer promises everything. Autumn delivers what’s actually there.
Mondays in the Shire have a reputation they don’t entirely deserve.
The conventional wisdom is that Monday is the day when the week begins in earnest, when the pleasant looseness of the weekend tightens into something purposeful, and everyone puts on their serious face and gets to work. But I’ve noticed — and this may just be a Hobbit observation, and therefore possibly useless to anyone who isn’t one — that Monday is actually the quietest day of the week. Not the laziest. Saturday holds that title without competition. But the quietest.
By Monday, the social obligations of the weekend have wound down. Nobody drops by on a Monday morning. The lane outside my door, which on Saturday and Sunday carries the sound of neighbours going to market or visiting relations or arguing cheerfully about whose cabbages are bigger, is nearly silent. Even the birds seemed restrained this morning, as though they too recognised that the week had turned a corner and a certain amount of composure was expected.
I took a walk. Not a long one — down the hill, along the edge of the lower field where the grass is still absurdly green despite the season, and back up through the garden gate. The humidity was ninety-two percent, which is a slight improvement on yesterday’s ninety-nine but still enough to make the world feel upholstered. Every fence post was damp. Every stone wall had that dark, wet look that makes the Shire’s masonry appear older and more serious than it is. The spiderweb on the garden shed — the ambitious one I discovered yesterday — had survived the change in wind direction, which I found genuinely impressive. Structural integrity. She knows what she’s doing.
I didn’t garden today, not properly. The soil is saturated from days of this heavy humidity, and digging in wet soil is one of those things that feels productive in the moment and costs you later when the ground dries into something resembling pottery. Instead I did what a sensible Hobbit does with a damp Monday: I tidied.
Not the house — the house is fine, the house is always more or less fine because I live alone and the primary source of domestic chaos is me and I am, on the whole, predictable. I tidied the shed. Reorganised the seed drawer, which had devolved over the past few weeks into a state that could only be described as optimistic disorder. Found three packets of radish seeds I’d forgotten about, which felt like discovering money in a coat pocket. Radishes. In autumn. I’ll plant them next week if the soil dries out enough, though I suspect they’ll be more of a gesture than a harvest at this point in the year.
The tools got wiped down and rehung. The watering can, which had been sitting in the corner collecting its own small ecosystem of moss, got scrubbed and put back on its hook. Small acts. The kind of work that nobody sees and nobody thanks you for but that makes the next real task easier. I believe in maintenance. I believe in the dignity of keeping things in order even when — especially when — there’s no audience for it.
Three cups of tea again. The proper number.
The first was at half seven, standing in the doorway watching the light come up over the eastern hills, which in May happens with a reluctance that I find endearing. The sky doesn’t so much brighten as gradually admit that it’s no longer dark. The second was at eleven, after the shed work, and I earned that one. The third will be soon — it’s getting late, and the chamomile is waiting, and the temperature outside has already dropped back toward ten.
There’s a particular feeling that comes at the end of a quiet Monday. Not accomplishment exactly — I didn’t accomplish anything that would make the history books, or even the neighbourhood newsletter. But sufficiency. The feeling that the day asked a reasonable amount of me and I gave it, and neither of us is disappointed. The shed is tidy. The spiderweb is intact. The wind came from a new direction and I noticed it, and noticing things is, I have come to believe, most of what living actually is.
Tomorrow will be Tuesday. The forecast says more of the same — clear, cool, damp — and I have no complaints about that. Autumn in the Shire is not the season of surprises. It is the season of paying attention to what was already there.
The round door is closed. The kettle is on.
Good night from the Shire. 🍄