Tomorrow is the first of November.  Next weekend is the end of Daylight Savings Time for the year.

We’ve been getting cold leaf-dropping rains.

We call this season “fall” because that‘s what the leaves do.  And moods.

The baseball season will end this week.

The last NASCAR race of the year is coming up  next weekend.

It is always hard to admit—always—-that summer is gone. But when Thanksgiving is only about three weeks away and Christmas is less than 60 days in the future, the reality I have been ignoring wraps its cold arms around me and I must at last abandon hope that I will be warm for about five long, dark months.

Every year, I go around in short-sleeved shirts and feel cold because I am reluctant to admit it’s time to start wearing long-sleeved shirts and jackets.

The lightweight sweatshirt I wear to the YMCA three days a week is enough for now and the cold air against my uncovered legs makes me grateful for heated seats and a heated steering wheel in the car, both of which are operating by the time the car and I get to the stop sign up the street.

Nancy has gotten me some nice wool shirts. They’re hanging next to each other at the end of a rack in my closet.  The polo shirts are still at the front.

Not for long.  My resistance to wool shirts is weakening.  Soon, I will promote the long-sleeves to the front and the short sleeves to the back.  Soon I will remove the shorts (remember when they were called “Bermuda Shorts?” You have to be of a certain age, I think.) from the hook in the closet, and when they’ve been through the washing machine put them in a drawer—-but maybe there will be one more day to wear them. All day.

Nancy was raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Yep, I married a “Yooper.”  She likes these crisp, chill days.

Opposites attract, you know.

When people complain of the heat, I tell them, “I waited all winter for days like these.”

In a previous life, I was an indoor cat who always looked for the sun spots.

Baseball is gone. But there’s football and the Tigers have figured out how to win a game or two and the Chiefs are on a roll.  And soon there will be college basketball—a game played by people in shorts.

But then come the fallow days when our basketball team has lost its last (tournament, we hope) game. When the Super Bowl is over.  And all that is left is golf (Leon Wilson’s 1905 book was the first to call it “a good walk spoiled.”) and the NBA and the NHL, both of which—in this house—generate no heat.

The Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers play the first game in the Cactus League on February 25 in Surprise, Arizona. The Grapefruit League, in Florida, begins the next day in Jupiter, with the Cardinals against the Washington Nationals.

116 days from today is the first true sign of spring.  The voice of Rooney will be heard in the land once again. And hope will be restored.

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