The piece on the diagonal, it’s to brace against the...

The piece on the diagonal, it’s to brace against the wind.
Strange to think that behind the walls, there’s wood doing work to keep your
home from blowing over. The winds were strong today, and cold. We worked
outside, framing new walls that will extend the one shown here. I didn’t wear
enough clothes and felt the first real cold of the season, a chill, an ache, a
giddy, shivery numbness of mind. It’s felt like November in all the right ways
these days, most of all between three-thirty and four-thirty in the afternoon
when the light is like no other light in all the year. Yesterday, the rain was
of autumn. Today, the wind was of winter. Over the weekend, at a friend’s
baby’s first birthday party, I had the good luck to have a conversation about
months with someone’s father; I like these conversations most of all. October
was his favorite. And from my informal poling, that seems to be most popular – high
fall, the eruption of color, the fading warmth, the first sweater. He talked
about the light, the golden light. I agreed it was great, and made an argument
for November’s magic dusks. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. There’s something electric in
that light, isn’t there.” He spoke about being on a drive last month, rounding
a corner on a road on an October afternoon, and mortality descended, a sudden
and full-force confrontation. It wasn’t terror, he said, or exhilaration, more
totality of fact. And something of October’s golden glow was of some comfort in
the face of it. “November, though,” he said, “November has claws.”