Up Late

Just barely a small leaning towards getting on the cooler side of warm this morning. A fellow worker actually came to work with pride in the sweater he was wearing. In Texas sweaters are exactly what the name implies. They come with a tag that says: WARNING TEXAS RESIDENTS - If garment is worn before February 23 or After March 15th wearer will experience profuse perspiration unless worn indoors under direct supervision of a professional air conditioning or refrigeration technician.

Well it may not actually say "professional"

I remember getting about a hundred sweaters growing up. Unlike most clothes that a boy gets they were actually exciting in a way. I imagined that my parents knew something about an impending cold spell and that this rich red and black long sleeved sweater was going to be needed to keep me warm as we built snowmen while keeping a wary eye out for avalanches or thin ice covered lakes. The imagination of a young artist is a fertile and hearty thing. The kind of snow we actually ever got maybe 2 or 3 times in 30 years you had to use an electron microscope to tell if it wasn't just really cold rain or ash from the neighbor’s fire place. We always ended up giving the sweaters to Goodwill. I imagine some kid ended up getting one the next Christmas and having this wonderful fantasy about giant snowmen and sledding acrossed frozen lakes wearing his unused red and black sweater.

No snow this morning and I actually didn't start sweating until I was almost to the office door. That’s a good-what almost-20 feet from my parking space. Brrrrrrr! But I must confess with all the intended hopes of an inclination towards an extremely early frost, in honor of the daydream of coolness, I built a fire in the yard. Yeah it was hot and humid and mosquito-infested but dangit it smelled good.
Oak, oak brush and leaves from the yard. Yeah! All I needed was some of my beautiful wife's homemade cocoa.

And a temperature below 78.

And maybe a sweater.