There was no rain in yesterday's forecast. Nonetheless, it rained all day, a slow unproductive drizzle that dampened sidewalks and curled hair but made no impression on the soil. Somehow I ended up going for two walks in this weather--once to fetch stew beef and mushrooms from the meat market, and then again before dark, when the stew was in the oven and the baseball game was languishing in those mid-innings doldrums and I was itching for something to do. So Tom and I walked out into the wet dusk, among the orange-leafed maples, among the lichen-patched gravestones. And then we returned and listened to the final plays of a bad baseball season, and waited for Joe Castiglione to read his closing prayer, as he always does at the end of the last Red Sox game, always these words from Bart Giammati's Take Time for Paradise--

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

Click goes my phone, and I know it is a son, texting. "It always makes me teary," he taps. Because he, too, so many miles away from me, has been waiting for these words. They are the gate to winter.

Today I hope to finish up this editing project. I need to plan for next week's Monson class, and for Sunday's chapbook class. I need to plant garlic. I'll probably go out to write tonight. This has been a good week, steady and slow, with space for everything. 

And tomorrow is my birthday, another gate.