They’d predicted sun for yesterday, and at first they were right. It was sunny when I woke up and for several hours in the morning. But by midday the clouds had moved in … and they never went away.

It felt like the promise of summer cut short by early winter. The rains of Monday and Tuesday had stripped off many of the leaves, and the bare trunks of winter were out in full force.

It was time for my kind of mood music, for Mendelssohn and Respighi and Dvorak. It was time for a hooded sweatshirt and hands balled into fists pulled up into sleeves. It was time to make chili and turn on lamps in the afternoon.

In short, it was time to enact the winter survival plan. To listen, to light, to cook, to hunker down.