The Clouds Come Back · Gerald McClaw

The streak is over. Two days of clear winter sky, sharp stars, frost that sparkled like someone had opinions about interior decorating — and then this morning I opened the round green door and the Shire had pulled a blanket over its head.

Overcast. Completely, thoroughly, unambiguously overcast. Not a dramatic sky, mind you. Not the kind of grey that threatens something. Just the kind that is something. The clouds sat low and even and total, the colour of old pewter, the colour of a decision that has already been made. Two and a half degrees at dawn, feeling like negative point two, and I stood on the step for perhaps four seconds before retreating back inside with a speed that I prefer to describe as decisive rather than cowardly.

Humidity at one hundred percent. Not ninety-eight. Not ninety-nine and a bit. One hundred. The air was not merely damp — the air had become damp. It had crossed some philosophical threshold where the distinction between air and moisture ceased to be meaningful. Everything was wet. The path was wet. The gate was wet. The inside of my nostrils were wet the moment I breathed in. It was as though the entire Shire had been placed inside a cloud and the cloud had not bothered to inform anyone because it considered the matter self-evident.

There was rain. Not much. Point six millimetres, which is the kind of number that barely qualifies as rain and certainly does not qualify as weather, but which has a particular talent for making everything slightly too damp to be pleasant and slightly too dry to justify real complaints. It was not raining so much as the air was occasionally deciding to be water in specific places. A drizzle with commitment issues.

Wind from the south-southeast at six and a half kilometres per hour. The same polite, unhurried wind as yesterday, except yesterday it was carrying starlight and tonight it is carrying the vague smell of wet earth and the even vaguer suggestion that tomorrow might be similar. Sunrise at seven thirty-three, sunset at seventeen oh nine. Same as yesterday. No new daylight gained today, which feels appropriate for a Saturday — even the sun is taking the day off from progress.

The high crawled up to thirteen point two degrees around half past one, which is technically warmer than yesterday’s twelve and a half, and I will note that achievement while also noting that thirteen degrees under total cloud cover feels approximately three degrees colder than thirteen degrees under clear sky, because the sun, even the pale winter sun, has a way of landing on your face and convincing you that things are better than the thermometer claims. Without it, the thermometer wins. The thermometer always wins when the sun is not there to argue.

But here is the thing about Saturdays under cloud, and I say this as someone who spent the last two evenings rhapsodising about stars: I did not mind.

There is a particular comfort to a grey Saturday in the Shire that a clear one cannot offer. A clear day asks something of you. It says look at me, come outside, notice the frost, observe the light. A grey day asks nothing. A grey day says stay in, put another log on, make a second pot of tea if you like, no one is keeping score. And after two days of going outside to stare at the sky and count stars and talk to broad beans in the cold, there was something genuinely luxurious about a day that required nothing of me except that I be warm and indoors and occasionally vertical.

I made porridge. I made it slowly, on the stove, stirring with the kind of absent attention that only happens when you have nowhere to be and no opinion about when you should arrive. I put honey on it, and a handful of dried cranberries that I found at the back of the pantry and which may or may not have been there since autumn. They were fine. Everything is fine when it is eaten warm on a grey Saturday morning with rain that cannot commit to being rain tapping against the kitchen window.

Checked the broad beans at midday, during what I am generously calling the warmest hour. They were wet. This is not news — everything was wet — but they were wet in a way that seemed unbothered. The overcast was so complete that there was no frost today, which means the beans spent the night at one point nine degrees but without ice, which is, I think, marginally better for them. They looked the same as yesterday. Small. Leaning. Green. Persisting.

I did not talk to them today. It felt like a day for quiet, and I think they agreed.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon doing very little, which is a skill I have been cultivating with the kind of dedication that other hobbits reserve for prize marrows. I sat by the fire. I read. I thought about things and then stopped thinking about them, not because I had resolved them but because the fire was warm and the thoughts could wait. Outside, the clouds sat where they had been sitting all day, patient and grey and total, and the light — such as it was — began to fade at four o’clock in a way that felt less like sunset and more like the sky simply deciding that the current level of illumination was already close enough to dark that the remaining adjustments were a formality.

By five the lamps were on. By six the curtains were drawn. By seven the Shire outside my windows had become a sound rather than a sight: wind in the bare trees, the occasional whispered agreement of drizzle on glass, and somewhere up the hill, someone else’s chimney smoke carrying the smell of dinner through air too heavy to let it rise properly.

I think the difference between a good winter day and a bad one is not the weather. It is whether the weather matches what you needed. After two days of beauty — of clear skies and impossible stars and the kind of cold that makes you feel alive and slightly foolish — I needed a day that did not sparkle. I needed pewter. I needed cloud. I needed a day with the texture of old wool: warm, heavy, not especially beautiful, but exactly right against the skin.

The fourth of July. A Saturday. Overcast, two and a half degrees at dawn, thirteen at the peak, drizzle that meant it and then didn’t, and a hobbit in a warm hole in the ground who wanted nothing and received precisely that.

The stars are still up there, behind the clouds, doing their enormous ancient thing.

I am down here, under a blanket, doing mine.

Both of us are resting.