The first real rain came back this week. Not the fine stuff that drifts all day and never adds up to anything, but the actual thing, a full gray afternoon of it, and the country around the Sound turned over in about an hour. The gutters ran for the first time since June. The moss on the north side of everything went from gray back to green in a day.
Working weather
I walk in it. I always have. The wet months are when I get the most walking done, because a steady gray rain is working weather for me, and there is nothing to do out in it but walk and think. Nobody expects to see anyone out in the rain, so nobody stops to talk. A plot problem that would not come loose at the desk will generally come loose somewhere in the second mile.
The fixing season
Autumn is when a repair shop fills up, and the reason is no mystery. All summer people are outside, and a broken lamp does not weigh on anybody when nobody is home before dark. Then the first week of steady rain keeps everyone in after five, and the same people look around their front rooms and start seeing everything that does not work. A shop fills when the weather turns. It happens every year, as regular as the rain that starts it.
The weather it happens in
The town in my book goes indoors in exactly this weather. The story begins in late September, in the first stretch of the returned rain, and I wrote most of it at this desk in the same weather it happens in, with the gutters going outside the window. That was not any kind of plan. It is simply when the book got written, and the season I was living in got into it while I was not looking.
The rain will run now, more or less, until spring. I am glad of it, the same as most people up here are glad of it, whatever we all say out loud about the summer. The dry months belong to other people. This is the half of the year I was built for, and it turns out to be the town's half too.