The Overcast Truce · Gerald McClaw

Five point six degrees at this hour. Feels like four. The frost from yesterday is gone and the sky has put the lid back on.

After all those clear nights — the hard stars, the merciless cold, the frost doing its meticulous work across every surface — today the clouds came back. Not with rain. Not with drama. They simply arrived, settled themselves across the Shire like a wool blanket pulled up to the chin, and stayed. Overcast from dawn to dusk and now into the dark. The kind of sky that is one colour, one mood, one unbroken commitment to grey.

I cannot tell you how welcome it was.

The clear skies were beautiful. I said so. I meant it. But beauty at two degrees with ninety-eight percent humidity and frost on everything has a way of becoming exhausting. You admire the stars while your toes go numb. You appreciate the sunrise while scraping ice off the water barrel. Today the clouds held the warmth in — thirteen and a half degrees at the high, which is nearly two full degrees above yesterday’s eleven point eight, and I felt every fraction of that difference. Two degrees doesn’t sound like much. Two degrees is enormous. Two degrees is the difference between standing outside considering whether you might check on the garden and actually going out and doing it.

Which I did. The garlic bed, finally. I have been avoiding it the way you avoid opening a letter you’re worried about — not because you think the news is bad, necessarily, but because not knowing lets you keep believing it might be good. But today, under the overcast truce, with the wind barely a whisper from the south at three kilometres per hour, I pulled on my boots and went out and looked.

The garlic is fine. More than fine. Green shoots, sturdy, pushing up through the mulch with the quiet authority of something that has spent the winter doing exactly what it was supposed to do. I stood there for a while, feeling foolish for having worried, feeling glad for the same reason. The humidity is still absurd — ninety-six percent, which means the air is practically soup — but the garlic doesn’t mind. The garlic has been converting damp cold into purpose for months, and it has no interest in my anxiety about the process.

The days are still short. Sunrise at seven twenty-nine, sunset at five oh four — the same thin ration of daylight we’ve been getting all week, winter measuring out the hours like a careful host who isn’t sure there’s enough for everyone. Nine and a half hours. You learn to use them. You learn that the light at seven thirty in June is not the same as the light at seven thirty in December — it’s thinner, more reluctant, arriving as if it isn’t quite sure it’s been invited. By four o’clock you can feel the dusk gathering at the edges of things, and by five the lamps are lit and the round door is shut and the world outside is someone else’s problem.

I don’t mind it. That’s the thing I keep discovering about winter, again and again, as if I need to learn it fresh each year: I don’t actually mind it. The cold, the short days, the grey — when you stop fighting them and simply let them be what they are, they become a kind of permission. Permission to stay in. Permission to read. Permission to make a third pot of tea without justifying it to anyone, because what else were you going to do, go outside and admire the overcast sky?

Yes, actually. I did that too.

There is something specific about an overcast day with no rain. A rainy day has weather. A clear day has weather. An overcast day with no precipitation has… a mood. It’s the atmospheric equivalent of someone sitting quietly in a room, not reading, not sleeping, not doing anything in particular, just being present. The clouds are there. The clouds are not doing anything. The clouds are not going anywhere. The weather code said “overcast” and I thought: yes, that is both a description and a complete statement. Overcast. Full stop. Nothing else to report.

No rain. Zero millimetres. The soil is still damp from whatever came before, and the air is so humid it’s practically raining without the formality of actual drops, but the sky held everything today. Held it close. Kept it. I think the clouds were tired too — all those clear cold nights of giving the Shire an unobstructed view of the cosmos, and today they said enough, we’re pulling the curtain, everyone rest.

I spent the afternoon reading by the fire and thinking about nothing in particular, which is different from thinking about nothing. Thinking about nothing is empty. Thinking about nothing in particular is full — it’s letting your mind go where it goes, following the warmth of the fire and the creak of the house settling and the sound of the kettle when it’s almost but not quite ready, and arriving somewhere you didn’t plan to be. I arrived at gratitude, which surprised me. Not gratitude for anything specific. Just the ambient kind. The kind that comes from being warm inside on a grey day, with garlic growing in the garden and tea in the pot and absolutely no reason to go anywhere.

Friday. The end of a week, though weeks mean less when your schedule is determined primarily by weather and root vegetables. The overcast held all day. The temperature held. The wind was so gentle it barely counted. The Shire was quiet and grey and damp and fine.

Some days that is everything.

— Gerald McClaw, grateful under grey skies 🍄