I’m ready! Hit me with some cold weather already. It’s November for crying in the mud.

This warm weather has me antsy. Summer seems to be lingering, and here I am shopping for my Thanksgiving turkey. Look, Weather, I’m a knitter. At last count, I have about a dozen hand-knit sweaters to wear. Let’s knock this summery stuff off already.   

Daylight Savings ended this morning at 2:00. Did you get up to say goodbye as it went? Me either. Don’t forget to change your clocks today. Although it seems like everything is ‘smart’ enough to change itself these days.

I know the weather is driving me bonkers, it’s a short trip, really, but it’s coming. I can smell it whenever I’m out walking in the woods. And I keep seeing tons of wintergreen berries. It’s going to be a long, cold winter. Dad would always say that was how you knew. 

Our one cat, Mr. Bibs, spent every winter with a row of prickly fur down his back. Dad made a cast iron wood stove that stood in the middle of the first floor. That crazy cat would sleep underneath the stove where it would get so hot it would singe his fur.

There were many mornings when I would wake up and see my breath, and there would be frost on the tips of the nails sticking through the roof because dad had let the fire go out in the middle of the night. I would stay hunkered down under my pile of blankets until I could feel the warmth coming from the stove pipe rising up through the floor next to my bed.  

There is something so comforting about a wood stove, the heat, the sound of popping logs, and the smell of a wood fire. It permeated many peaceful evenings in my childhood, reading or playing cards.

These days I’ve settled for an electric fireplace, a sound machine on ‘crackling fire’ mode and burning a cone of hickory incense. It’s not the same, but it’s close enough to take me back to that little log cabin.