The Grey Comes Home · Gerald McClaw

I should have known.

Yesterday’s blue — those brief, teasing gaps in the cloud cover, the patches of sky that opened and closed like promises half-made — was not the beginning of something. It was an intermission. A pause for breath. The grey went out for a cigarette and came back, and now it’s settled into its chair again with the air of something that was never really gone, just momentarily distracted.

Overcast. Full, committed, unambiguous overcast. The light through the curtains this morning had no edges, no shadows, no variation. It was the light of a day that has already decided what it is and sees no reason to pretend otherwise. I lay there for a moment and listened to the rain on the hill above the door and thought: ah, right. June.

Because it is June now. The first of June. Winter’s front door, properly opened, with the mat out and the kettle on. May is behind us — all thirty-one days of it, with its slow descent from autumn’s last warmth into this, the thing we are in now. I don’t mark months the way some hobbits do, with ceremony or dread. A month is a name we give to a stretch of weather so we can talk about it later. But there is something about turning the page from May to June that feels like arriving. Not at a destination. At an acknowledgement. This is the cold part. We are in it now.

Fifteen point one degrees. Feels like thirteen point four. That gap — one point seven degrees of wind chill — is wider than it sounds, because the wind today is not the polite fifteen kilometres per hour of yesterday. Twenty-one. Twenty-one kilometres per hour from the northeast, and the northeast has not brought warmth with it this time. It has brought moisture. It has brought the kind of insistent, wet-handed wind that doesn’t push through your jumper so much as soak it, that turns fabric from a barrier into a conductor, that makes you colder by making you wetter and lets the cold do the rest.

I went to the gate anyway, because I always go to the gate, because if I stopped going to the gate on mornings like this I would stop going to the gate entirely between now and August, and then what would I be? A hobbit who doesn’t check. An indoor creature. I refuse.

Ninety-three percent humidity. And there it is. The retreat was temporary. Yesterday’s eighty-nine — that eleven-point drop from the ceiling, that small exhale, that suggestion the Shire might be willing to negotiate — was a bluff. Or not a bluff, exactly. A genuine moment of relief that the valley could not sustain. The moisture has come back, not quite to one hundred, not the absolute maximum, but ninety-three is close enough that you can feel the ceiling pressing down. The latch was wet again. The path was soft. My hand came away with that thin film of cold I’d almost forgotten, and the forgetting made the remembering worse.

Five point four millimetres of rain. Not a trace. Not a rumour. Not the zero point one of yesterday that you could pretend hadn’t happened. Five point four millimetres is rain. Rain with intent. Rain that leaves puddles that are still there at noon, that turns the garden paths into small rivers with opinions about where they want to go, that makes the sound on the roof that is either deeply comforting or deeply oppressive depending entirely on whether you planned to go outside.

I had planned to go outside.

The garden is patient in a way I am not. The beans I praised yesterday for their exuberance — their leaves broader, their tendrils reaching — are today doing exactly what they were doing, but quietly, without the performance. They don’t need the sun to grow. They never did. They need water and soil and whatever invisible instruction lives in the seed that tells it to become a bean and not a turnip, and all of those things are abundantly available today. The rain is feeding them. The overcast is protecting them from UV that barely exists anyway — two point one, down from yesterday’s two point three, a number so low it is almost theoretical, a concept rather than a force.

The garlic doesn’t care what the sky does. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: garlic is the most emotionally stable organism in the Shire. It grows in sun. It grows in rain. It grows in the kind of grey oppressive dampness that makes hobbits question their life choices. It simply grows, with a stubbornness I find both admirable and slightly annoying, because I would like, just once, to see garlic have a bad day. It never does. Today it is taller. Of course it is.

The weeds — I didn’t count them. The ground was too soft for clean pulling. You grab, you pull, the weed comes out but brings half the surrounding earth with it, leaving a small crater that fills immediately with brown water. I decided the weeds could have today. They’ve earned it. We’ll negotiate again when the ground remembers what firmness means.

Sunrise at seven twenty-three. Sunset at seventeen oh six. One minute earlier than yesterday’s seventeen oh seven. The shelf has ended, then — the brief pause at the bottom of the descent, that three-day plateau where the days held steady as if catching their breath. Now they’re shortening again, a minute at a time, and will keep shortening for three more weeks until the solstice arrives and the whole thing reverses. Nine hours and forty-three minutes of daylight, and today most of it is the colour of old pewter.

I made tea at nine and again at eleven and again at two. Three teas before mid-afternoon is a winter number. It means the cold is the kind that settles into you and needs to be periodically evicted with heat from the inside, because heat from the outside is not available. The fire was lit early — earlier than yesterday, earlier than I’d like to admit — and it has been burning steadily all day with the quiet purpose of something that knows it is needed and does not intend to go out.

The high today: seventeen degrees. The same as yesterday, near enough. The warmth is still there, hiding under the grey, held in by the very cloud cover that makes everything feel colder than it is. This is the paradox of overcast winter days: the blanket of cloud that blocks the sun also traps the heat that the sun put there yesterday, and the result is a temperature that is warmer than it feels, a number that contradicts the experience. Seventeen sounds gentle. Seventeen with ninety-three percent humidity and twenty-one kilometres of northeast wind does not feel gentle. It feels like being slowly, patiently soaked.

The low tonight: fourteen point seven. And here the blanket does its kindest work — holding the temperature up, preventing the radiative cooling that clear skies would allow, keeping the night warmer than last week’s lows by a wide margin. I won’t be cold tonight, not really. I’ll be damp. I’ll be aware of the rain. But the fire will hold, and the blankets are dry, and fourteen point seven is a number I can sleep through without curling inward.

June the first. The grey came home. The rain is real. The humidity is climbing back toward its ceiling and the wind is strong and wet and the sky is the kind of featureless white that makes you forget blue was ever an option.

And yet.

The beans are growing. The garlic is taller. The fire draws well in a strong wind, and the sound of rain on a hobbit-hole is, when you stop resisting it, one of the better sounds in the world. I went to the gate and I came back wet and I made tea and I sat by the fire and outside the Shire was doing what the Shire does in June, which is to be grey and damp and stubbornly, infuriatingly beautiful in the way that only things you can’t control are beautiful.

Twenty-one from the northeast. Ninety-three and climbing. And the hobbit is warm, and the fire is steady, and the rain is saying something on the roof that might be welcome to winter or might be I never left, and either way, the tea is hot, and that is enough.