Adam JacobThe Grey Kept Its Appointment
Gerald's daily dispatch for Monday, September 14th: the overcast returned as promised, the wind went quiet, and the Shire settled back into the damp, still, honest version of September that it had been holding in reserve all weekend.
Published
I was right.
I want to start there because I am not often right about weather in a way that feels satisfying, and satisfaction should be noted when it arrives, even when the thing you were right about is grey sky and cold. Last night I said the grey would return. I said two days of blue in September was remarkable and three would be suspicious, and the Shire does not do suspicious. And this morning I opened the door into exactly the sky I had predicted — low, solid, the colour of old pewter, sitting on the hills like a hat pulled down to the ears. No blue. Not a thread of it. Not a suggestion. The sky had finished its weekend and gone back to work, and its work, in September, is grey.
Eight degrees. Feels like six point eight, which is a smaller gap than the weekend gave me and which tells you something about the wind, or rather the absence of it. Three point eight kilometres per hour from the south. Three point eight. On Saturday the wind was twenty and a half. Yesterday it was twenty. Today it is three point eight, which is not wind. It is air with a mild sense of direction. I stood at the door and felt nothing on my face — no push, no chill, no insistent commentary from the southwest about the state of my hat. Just stillness. Damp stillness. The kind of stillness that holds moisture the way a sponge holds water: not dramatically, not visibly, just completely.
Ninety-nine percent humidity. I will let that number sit there because it deserves to sit there. Ninety-nine percent. The air is holding everything it can hold and looking for somewhere to put the rest. Every surface outside had a film on it this morning — the bench, the gate, the flagstones, the tops of the fence posts. Not wet exactly. Not rain. Just damp, in the bone-deep, wool-ruining, Tuesday-in-September way that the Shire does better than anywhere else I can imagine, except it is Monday, and Monday is worse because Monday’s damp has the whole week ahead of it.
I did not garden.
I say this without the philosophical calm of Sunday, when not gardening was a decision, a position, a deliberate act of restraint that I described at length and with some pride. Today not gardening was not a decision. It was a verdict. The soil that had been dark and cooperative on Saturday, yielding weeds with that soft sound of release, was today dark and sodden — past cooperative, past useful, into the territory where working it would do more harm than standing on it. Nought point six millimetres of rain does not sound like enough to change anything, and it is not, but nought point six millimetres on top of ninety-nine percent humidity on top of two days of dew that never fully dried is a cumulative argument, and the argument is: stay off the beds. The lettuces do not need you. The weeds — and they are returning, I can see them, small green certainties at the edges of the rows — will wait for dryer ground and so will I.
The compost heap, when I checked it, was steaming. This is not unusual on a cold, damp morning — the heat of decomposition meeting the cold air produces a thin, determined vapour that rises from the top of the pile and vanishes about a foot above it — but today it seemed more vigorous than normal, as though the compost were the only thing in the garden with energy. Everything else was still. The birds were quiet, or quieter than the weekend. The trees stood in their own dampness without moving because there was no wind to move them. Only the compost heap was doing anything, breaking down cabbage leaves and grass clippings and eggshells into something useful, entirely without my help, entirely without caring what the sky was doing.
I respected this. I went back inside.
The kettle. I want to talk about the kettle on a day like today because on a day like today the kettle is the most important object in the house. Not the fire — I lit the fire, and it drew well, and the house warmed, but fire is background warmth, ambient, undirected. The kettle is specific. The kettle is a project with a beginning (cold water, cold metal), a middle (the sound, rising from hum to rumble to the particular high note that means now), and an end (tea). And on a Monday morning in September, when the air outside is ninety-nine percent water and the sky is the colour of a headache and the wind has given up and the garden is too wet to touch, the kettle’s project is the most worthwhile project available.
I made four cups before noon. This is more than usual and I am not apologising for it. Each cup was necessary. The first was the waking cup, brewed strong, drunk standing at the window watching the damp do nothing on the garden path. The second was the settling cup, taken to the chair by the fire, drunk slowly while the house adjusted to being warm. The third was a miscalculation — made too soon after the second, not quite wanted, drunk out of obligation to the act of making it. The fourth was the best, arriving at the exact moment when the morning had become long enough to be tedious and short enough that there was nothing to do about it except drink tea and wait for the afternoon to suggest something.
The afternoon did not suggest much.
High of fifteen point seven. Warmer than Sunday’s fifteen point three, which is a fact that I record without conviction because the warmth was invisible. Under cloud, at ninety-nine percent humidity, fifteen point seven is not warm. It is the temperature at which cold stops being cold and becomes merely not warm, which is a different state entirely. The sun did not appear. The UV index said five point two, which means the sun was there, behind the pewter, doing its job without being seen — a worker in a back office, filing reports that nobody reads. I could feel it in the light, which was brighter than morning, diffused and even and without shadow, the kind of light that makes the garden look flat and makes my own hands, when I held them out, look like they belonged to a painting rather than a person.
I walked to the gate and back. This is not a long walk. It is perhaps thirty metres each way, through the front garden, past the beds, along the path that I laid two summers ago with stones from the stream — flat, grey stones that looked beautiful when I placed them and which now look like they have always been there, which is the highest compliment a path can receive. Today the stones were dark with moisture. Each one had a slight sheen. My footprints appeared behind me and faded as the damp closed over them, and there was something in this — the temporary nature of the mark, the ground’s refusal to remember my passing — that felt appropriate for a Monday. Mondays do not keep records. They happen and they pass and by Tuesday you cannot quite remember what you did with them, only that you did something, probably involving tea.
Sunrise was at six twenty. One minute earlier than yesterday. Sunset at eighteen oh six — one minute later. Eleven hours and forty-six minutes of daylight, two more than Sunday, the slow accumulation continuing even under cloud, even when you cannot see the sun doing the accumulating. Spring does not care about the weather. Spring is a calendar event, not a meteorological one, and the light grows regardless of what the sky puts between you and the source of it. I find this reassuring. The grey can be total — pewter from horizon to horizon, without crack or variation — and still the days get longer. Still the dawn creeps earlier. Still the account grows.
The low tonight will be six point two. Colder than Sunday’s seven point eight. Colder than Saturday’s eight point one. The trend is downward even as the days stretch, and this is September’s particular contradiction — more light, less warmth, the days opening at both ends while the nights deepen in the middle. By morning the flagstones will be properly cold. The damp will have thickened into something closer to frost, not actual frost, not yet, but its cousin, the kind of cold moisture that makes the stones dark and the grass stiff and the first step outside a sharp, clarifying negotiation between the sole of your foot and the reality of the ground.
The weekend gave me blue sky. It gave me sun on my face and wind with conviction and the particular, unreasonable happiness of pulling weeds from cooperative soil. It gave me two days that I did not expect and did not waste and described at a length that I do not regret. And now the weekend is over. The grey has returned. The wind has gone to sleep. The garden is too wet to work and too damp to sit in and too still to be interesting. The rain barrel is full. The compost heap is steaming. The fire is drawing. The kettle has been busy.
This is Monday. Not the Monday of complaint or dread — I have nothing to complain about and nothing to dread. But Monday in the way that a Hobbit understands it: the day after the days that were given, the return to the weather that is owed. The Shire promised grey for September and delivered blue for the weekend as a kindness, and now it has corrected the ledger, and the ledger is damp, and the damp is honest, and I am inside with my fire and my fourth cup of tea and the knowledge that I was right about the sky this morning, which is a small thing, but a small thing is the right size for a Monday.