Fall cleaning. That's how I spent last weekend. It's basically the same idea as Spring cleaning, it's just the season that is different. Cleaning the dust, Rudy and Edna hair tumbleweeds (after months of supplements - Omega 3 and 6, B vitamins, and something called 'Nzymes, Sophie has managed to grow a strip of sparse hair on her back but still doesn't shed), and washing what seems like an endless number of blankets. We sure need them. Today I turned the fan off, and decided it was time for the furnace. The animals were curled up in tight balls, reminiscent of a wooly bear caterpillar's reaction when it perceives a threat. One eye opens and they watch me when I enter the room; I am hit with a powerful message: we're cold. Do something.

Of course the pilot light is out, and despite my best efforts I can't get it to stay lit. So I added my pink sweatshirt top to the working-at-home ensemble. My hands are cold as I type. Don, a college friend in Oneonta, used to wear gloves inside. He hardly ever turned on the heat in his railroad apartment, preferring to tough it out. It would have cost a fortune with such high ceilings. I remember him now, fully outfitted for winter, leaning against the cheap paneling in his dark living room, a textbook open nearby, writing with a pen in a spiral bound notebook. He actually seemed to relish the cold. Strange to think he has been dead for twenty years. The image is literally frozen in time.

The leaves are about two weeks behind schedule, and it is far from peak right now. Behind this house, against the tree-covered slope on the other side of the ravine that goes up to the Mountain View Cemetery there is one small oak tree, a pioneer among its mostly still green neighbors, that has fully changed color to a deep reddish orange. I watch it from the back windows of the house, a symbol of the approaching winter.

Another strategy for coping with a chilly house, and one I much prefer to typing with gloves, is baking. We got apples over the weekend; a peck of Mutsus beckons from the porch. (The treadmill is nearby, but that is strangely silent.)