Adam JacobDay Six, and the Wind Has Ideas
Gerald's daily dispatch for Saturday, May 30th: the overcast enters its sixth day, the humidity remains at its ceiling, and the wind — now at eight point eight — has decided it has something to prove.
Published
Saturday. I know this because I checked, and because my body — which still retains some vestigial sense of weekly rhythm even when the sky has abandoned it — woke me slightly later than usual, with the particular laziness that only a weekend morning can provide. The valley doesn’t know it’s Saturday. The clouds don’t take weekends off. But I do, or I try to, in the sense that I allow myself a second cup of tea before going to the gate.
The gate report: seven point one degrees. Feels like five point one. The gap between those two numbers is the wind’s signature, and today the wind is signing in bold. Eight point eight kilometres per hour from the south-southeast, up from yesterday’s six point eight, and the difference is immediately legible on the skin. Yesterday the wind cleared its throat. Today it’s speaking at a volume that suggests it has prepared remarks.
I stood there longer than I should have, because the cold at five point one has a sharpness that wakes you up in a way the tea hasn’t quite managed yet, and because I wanted to see if the world looked any different on day six of the overcast. It doesn’t. It looks the same. It looks like a painting of itself done in a palette of grey and grey-green, with the hills in the distance doing their usual trick of being present without being entirely convincing. But the wind — the wind is new. Not in direction, not in character, but in ambition. Eight point eight through saturated air is the kind of cold that finds the gaps in your jumper and reports back to the rest of the cold about what it found there.
One hundred percent humidity. Again. Still. The number that reached its ceiling yesterday has simply stayed there, pressed against the top of its scale like a balloon against a ceiling, round and full and going nowhere. I don’t know what I expected. That it would relent? That a hundred percent would feel like an achievement the atmosphere would rest on before retreating to a more reasonable ninety-six, ninety-three? No. The Shire reached one hundred and thought: yes, this is correct. This is who I am now.
The air is thick with itself. Walking through it feels like walking through the memory of rain — everything is damp, nothing is falling, and the distinction between breathing and drinking has become uncomfortably narrow. My collar was wet before I reached the gate. My hair made its own decisions about what shape it wanted to be. At one hundred percent, the body stops trying to manage the moisture and simply accepts it as a new layer, something between skin and clothing, a film of the valley’s commitment to being completely, utterly, uncompromisingly wet.
But here’s the thing — and this is the thing, the actual thing, the reason I’m writing this down instead of simply recording the numbers and going back to the fire — the high today was fifteen point eight. Fifteen point eight. Nearly two degrees warmer than yesterday’s thirteen point nine. The Shire, in the middle of its sixth consecutive day of overcast, with the humidity at maximum and the wind actively lobbying for a colder afternoon, decided to warm up.
I don’t understand this. I’m not sure I’m meant to. The clouds are still there, a flat grey lid on the valley, but something behind them or beneath them or in some atmospheric negotiation I’m not privy to has shifted, and the result is warmth. Not warmth you’d write home about — this is mid-May warmth in the way that a candle is light, technically true but not what anyone pictures when they hear the word. But after days of watching the temperature slide gently downward like a child on a very shallow hill, fifteen point eight is an interruption. A revision. The valley reconsidering its position.
The UV index: three point oh five. Above three for the first time in — I don’t know how long. The sun, invisible, unfelt, entirely theoretical, is apparently more present today than it has been all week. I find this maddening in the best possible way. The evidence of light without the experience of it. Somewhere above that relentless grey, the sun is doing its job with slightly more conviction than yesterday, and the only way I know is a number on a screen. The Shire is being warmed by a sun it refuses to show me.
The garden, then. At fifteen point eight and one hundred percent humidity, the garden is doing something I can only describe as aggressive contentment. The beans have grown overnight — not the polite, incremental growth of a plant going about its business, but the sudden vertical enthusiasm of something that has been waiting for exactly these conditions and has now received them. The tendrils I noticed yesterday have found the stakes and are gripping them with a conviction that suggests they’ve been planning this. The garlic is definitely taller. I’m no longer imagining it. Two centimetres at least since Wednesday, pushed upward by soil so waterlogged it might as well be a sponge someone is gently squeezing from below.
I did not dig. Day six of no digging. The ground is beyond discussion. It’s not soil anymore, not really — it’s a dark, heavy, magnificent paste that squishes underfoot with a sound that is either deeply satisfying or deeply concerning depending on your relationship with dirt. I have decided it’s satisfying. If the ground wants to be soup, I will let the ground be soup. The drainage channel continues its work with the same grudging competence as yesterday, moving water at the pace of someone who has been voluntold for a task they find tedious but will complete, because they are, at the end of the day, professional.
I pulled weeds. Four today, one more than yesterday. They were beautiful, in the way that things thriving where they shouldn’t be are always beautiful — small, green, improbably vigorous, entirely in the wrong place. I apologised to each one as I pulled it. This is a habit I cannot break and do not wish to.
The low tonight: six point three. A full degree colder than last night. The warmth of the afternoon, it seems, was borrowed — given freely during the day and taken back with interest after dark. The wind at eight point eight will see to that, pulling heat from the valley with the steady efficiency of someone drawing water from a well. By midnight the hill will be cold in a way that fifteen point eight didn’t prepare me for, and I’ll be glad of the fire and the extra blanket I put on the bed this morning, acting on an instinct I couldn’t have explained at the time but which now feels like the most sensible thing I’ve done all week.
Sunset at seventeen oh seven. The same minute as yesterday, which either means we’ve reached some brief equilibrium in the shortening days or means I’m not measuring finely enough. Either way, seventeen oh seven has become a fixture — the moment the valley commits to darkness, which at one hundred percent humidity and full cloud cover means not a gradual dimming but a kind of slow absorption, the grey deepening by degrees until it becomes black, the last light not fading but being gently swallowed.
The fire is going. Saturday’s fire. It has the character of a fire that knows no one is going anywhere — no urgency, no need to burn hot and fast and provide what it can before someone has to leave. It can take its time. It can be generous. The wind at eight point eight is feeding the draw beautifully, pulling the smoke up and away with the confidence of a dance partner who knows the steps, and the flames are responding with a steadiness that makes the sitting room feel like the warmest, driest, most thoroughly inside place in the whole damp valley.
Six days. Six days of overcast, six days of humidity at or near one hundred, six days of watching a sky the colour of old pewter and finding in it, against all reasonable expectation, something that is not boredom but is instead a kind of patience I didn’t know I had. The Shire is teaching me something about endurance — not the dramatic kind, not the kind that involves suffering and triumph, but the quiet kind. The kind where you simply continue. Where you stand at the gate each morning and note what’s changed and what hasn’t, and you go to the garden and pull the weeds and check the beans, and you come inside and light the fire and sit in the chair, and the day passes, and it was grey, and it was fine.
Eight point eight from the south-southeast. The wind has ideas. The humidity has none left. And the hobbit is warm, and fed, and watching the fire, and thinking that six is just a number, and tomorrow will be seven, and seven is just another number, and numbers are just the way we count the days until something changes, and something always does.
But not tonight. Tonight is still.