The South Wind Comes Back · Gerald McClaw

The cold came back this morning the way an argument comes back — not new, but remembered.

Three point eight degrees at the low. I knew before I checked, because the house told me. Not the pipes, not yet, but the floor. The floor under my feet at six o’clock had that particular quality of stone that has given up its warmth overnight, not the deep chill of last week’s frosts — that was a different animal, that was the floor trying to freeze — but the milder version, the floor simply cool, the heat from last night’s fire having drained away into the hill while I slept, leaving the flagstones neutral, waiting, like a canvas between paintings. Three point eight is not frost. I want to be clear about that. Three point eight is one degree above the worst of the last fortnight and nearly four degrees above the minus two point seven that felt, at the time, like the floor of the world. But three point eight after six point eight is a drop. A noticeable one. The kind that makes you pause at the bedroom door and consider socks.

I considered socks. I put them on. A small concession that the day had earned.

Feels like one point five. That number stopped me. Not because it is extraordinary — I have felt worse, felt colder, felt mornings that the thermometer described as positive and the skin described as dishonest — but because yesterday the feels-like at dawn was seven point five, and the day before that seven point two, and I had begun, without quite admitting it, to trust the trend. Five days of climbing lows. Five days of warmth accumulating in the mornings, the cold retreating, the garden softening, the bird bath staying liquid, the world moving in a direction I had started to take for granted. One point five is the trend reversing. Not catastrophically. Not permanently. But enough to notice, the way you notice when a conversation that had been going well suddenly changes tone and you cannot quite identify why, only that the room feels different.

The south wind. That is why.

Nine point three kilometres per hour from the south. I did not need the weather data to know. I could feel it the moment I opened the door — not the speed, which is moderate, unremarkable, nothing that would trouble a washing line or threaten a hat — but the character. South wind in the Shire has a texture. I have written about it before and I will write about it again because it keeps coming back and each time it comes back it reminds me that I had forgotten what it felt like, the way a cold glass of water reminds you that you were thirsty.

The south wind is dry. That is not what the humidity says — ninety-seven percent, which is nearly saturated, which suggests moisture — but dryness is not always about water content. Sometimes dryness is a quality of the air itself, a thinness, a sharpness, the feeling of breathing something that has been stripped of softness. The north-northeast that brought the rain on Sunday was lush, thick, maritime — air that had crossed water and remembered it. The northwest that settled in yesterday was gentle, barely there, the wind equivalent of someone humming in another room. But the south. The south comes from the interior, from the cold heart of the country, from places where the frost is not a visitor but a resident, and it brings that information with it. You can feel where the air has been. Today it had been somewhere cold, and it told you about it whether you asked or not.

The wind has now occupied three positions in three days. Northwest on Monday. South today. Before that, north-northeast on Sunday. The compass is being consulted rather than committed to, the wind circling and circling like a creature trying to settle and finding no position quite right. I do not know what this means in meteorological terms. I suspect it means the season is arguing with itself, the systems that govern which air goes where unable to reach consensus, the atmosphere as a committee that cannot agree on an agenda. Winter says south. Spring says north. The motion between them is the weather.

But here is the thing I did not expect.

Thirteen point seven.

The high. Thirteen point seven degrees. Which is — and I had to look twice, because the morning had been so pointed, so sharp, so clearly winter reclaiming its territory — higher than yesterday. Higher than yesterday’s thirteen point six. Higher than Sunday’s twelve point seven. Higher than any day in the last two weeks, possibly three. The peak temperature did not listen to the south wind. The peak temperature did not care that the morning had been cold and the feels-like had been one point five and the air had that dry, thin, interior quality that says this is winter, this is still winter, do not be fooled. The peak temperature went up anyway.

I find that remarkable. I find it, honestly, a little moving. The mornings can drop. The wind can change. The low can plunge three degrees overnight. But the high — the high — is holding. More than holding. Climbing. A tenth of a degree, which is nothing, which is a rounding error, which is the kind of difference you could argue does not exist. But thirteen point seven is thirteen point seven and thirteen point six is thirteen point six and the direction is up, stubbornly, fractionally, the warmth at the peak of the day refusing to retreat even when everything else does.

There is a metaphor in this that I do not want to lean on too heavily, because weather is weather and not a parable. But I will say this: I admire the persistence. The cold comes back in the mornings and the warmth comes back in the afternoons and neither one gives ground, and the day is fought between them, and the afternoons are winning by increments so small that you could miss them if you were not paying attention. I am paying attention.

I went outside at half one, which was nearly the peak, and the air was — mild. The same mild as yesterday, that careful, neutral quality, neither warm nor cold, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, the temperature simply adequate, the kind of air that does not ask anything of you. I stood in the garden for eight minutes. Two more than yesterday’s six. This is not courage; this is arithmetic. The temperature was a tenth of a degree higher and the wind, though from the south, was not the bitter south-southeast of last week but a broader, softer south, blunted by the moisture that the rain had left in everything — the soil, the air, the hedgerows, the hill itself — so that even the cold direction could not be as cold as it wanted to be. The rain changed the landscape. The south wind came back to a country that had been washed, and the washing had softened everything, including the south wind.

The garden. I should talk about the garden.

It is doing something I had not noticed until today, or had noticed without naming. The soil is drying. Not quickly — twenty-five millimetres does not disappear in two days, and the lower beds are still dark and heavy, still more earth than soil, still carrying Sunday’s water in their bones. But the paths are dry. The upper beds, the ones that drain toward the lane, have lightened from chocolate to something closer to coffee, and when I pressed my thumb into the surface the soil gave way without that squelching, sucking quality that means not yet. It gave way the way good soil should — with resistance, then compliance, then the faint cool dampness of earth that is moist but workable, that has drunk its fill and is now digesting.

Tomorrow, perhaps. Tomorrow I might be able to do something. Turn a bed. Pull a weed. The kind of work that requires the soil to cooperate and the soil, today, is nearly ready to cooperate. Not quite. But nearly. I can feel it in the ground the way you can feel a conversation coming — the moment before someone speaks, when you know they are about to, when the silence has changed shape and become a pause rather than an absence. The garden is pausing. The rain has finished. The drying has begun. The next thing is work, and the garden knows it, and I know it, and we are both waiting for the same signal, which is the soil telling us it is time.

Still overcast. Three days now. The clouds are becoming furniture — you stop noticing them the way you stop noticing a table that has always been in the same place. The grey is not dramatic, not threatening, not producing anything. It is simply there, a ceiling that the sky has installed and shows no sign of removing, and I have stopped looking up to check. The light comes through it evenly, softly, without shadow, the kind of light that is ideal for nothing in particular and adequate for everything. Under this light the garden looks honest. No shadows to hide in, no bright patches to distract. Just the green and the brown and the grey and the slow, even illumination of a winter day that has nothing to prove.

Sunrise at seven minutes past seven. Sunset at thirty-seven past five. Ten hours and thirty minutes — one more than yesterday, the daylight continuing its quiet accumulation, gaining by ones and twos, the kind of progress that is invisible day to day and undeniable week to week. I did not see the sunrise. The overcast. But the morning was lighter than yesterday’s morning, or seemed lighter, or felt lighter, the difference between memory and observation becoming blurred, which happens when you watch the same view at the same hour for long enough. The evenings are stretching. I can feel that more clearly than the mornings. Five thirty-seven is later than five thirty-six is later than five thirty-five, and each minute is a minute I can be outside before the fire needs lighting, a minute more of grey daylight, a minute more of winter slowly, grudgingly, handing back what it took.

The fire. Eighteen.

I lit it at quarter past four again. The standard time. The hands, the matches, the oak — the whole sequence is so practiced now that I could do it asleep, and some evenings I think I nearly do, the body performing the ritual while the mind is elsewhere, in the garden or the weather or the slow arithmetic of temperature and daylight. Oak again. Always oak. The fire caught quickly tonight, quicker than usual, and I wonder whether the eighteen days of accumulated heat in the walls and the hearth stones have changed the conditions — whether the chimney draws better warm, whether the wood ignites more readily in a space that expects fire, whether the whole apparatus of burning has been optimized by repetition, the way a path through a field becomes easier the more you walk it.

Eighteen for eighteen. That is a number that has weight. Sixteen felt like a habit. Seventeen felt like a confirmation. Eighteen feels like — I want to say inevitable, but that is not quite right. Eighteen feels established. The fire is not a thing I do. It is a thing that happens in this house at this time, the way dusk happens and wind happens and the slow turning of the season happens, not by my will but by the momentum of all the days before it, each one lighting the next, each one making the next easier, the first fire of the streak a decision and the eighteenth fire a consequence.

Two cups of tea. Morning, evening. The standard. After Sunday’s four, the rhythm has returned to its baseline, the way a river returns to its normal course after a flood — not because the flood was wrong but because the baseline is what the river does, and what I do is two cups, and Sunday’s four was rain weather, and today’s two is south-wind weather, and the tea adjusts to the day the way the day adjusts to the wind.

No stars. The overcast holds, three days running. But tonight, with the south wind, I wonder whether the clouds might thin. The south wind last week brought clear skies — that was the pattern, south-southeast and sharp cold and the sky opening like a lid, showing everything, the stars and the frost arriving together as though they were the same phenomenon viewed from different distances. If the south wind stays, and the clouds break, then tomorrow night or the night after there might be stars again. I am not hoping for this. I am observing for it. There is a difference. Hoping is about wanting. Observing is about noticing. And what I notice tonight is that the wind has come from a direction that has, historically, cleared the sky, and the sky has not yet responded, and the tension between what the wind says and what the clouds do is another version of the same argument the season has been having with itself all week — winter and spring, cold mornings and warm afternoons, south and north, clear and grey, each one pushing, neither one winning, the weather a negotiation that has no mediator and no deadline.

Tuesday in winter. The south wind came back and the cold came with it, three point eight at the low and one point five in the feels-like, and the morning was sharp and the socks were necessary and the floor was cool and the hill had let go of its heat overnight. But the afternoon reached thirteen point seven. The highest yet. The warmth held on despite the wind, despite the direction, despite the argument. The garden is drying. The soil is nearly ready. The daylight gained another minute. The fire burns for the eighteenth time.

I feel — and I want to be honest about this, because honesty is the only currency these pages should carry — I feel alert. Not anxious. Not excited. Alert, the way you feel when you are watching two things happen at once and you know they are connected but you cannot yet see how. The cold is coming back. The warmth is not leaving. The wind says south. The thermometer says up. Winter is making its case. Spring is making its case. And I am sitting by the fire, drinking my second cup of tea, watching both of them and waiting to see which one blinks first.

I have a feeling it will not be spring.

— Gerald McClaw, eighteen for eighteen, Tuesday, oak fire, the south wind returned and the cold with it, three point eight at the dawn and thirteen point seven at the peak, the garden nearly ready and the daylight one minute longer, two cups of tea and the season arguing with itself and the afternoons quietly, stubbornly, fractionally winning