The rain is diluting the color this morning, stripping yellows and reds from the trees and washing them into the gutter like a painter’s palette washed out in the sink. And yet the leaves are doing their best to resist- gobbing up the gutters and piling up as high as the curb, establishing a beachhead of autumnal color against a slick black street and cracking sidewalk. I’m sitting in my window with a hot cup of tea that has infused its delicate flavor with cinnamon. A few months back I decided to store a ziploc bag of ground cinnamon along with my tea in a small tin can because, well, I had no other place to put it. The tin seemed as good a place as any, and I didn’t imagine then that the cinnamon would seep through the ziploc and infect sir earl and lady grey. Fortunately, the result is quite tasty, as are the flakes of sugar clinging to my fingertips…the last bits leftover from the chocolate frosted doughnut i devoured for breakfast.

As the rain continues to fall an occasional car will swoosh through the street- the sound of tires through puddles is one of my favorites. My neighbor Steve is coming home from the drugstore, white plastic bags in one hand, and a sagging, broken black umbrella in the other. He is dodging puddles as if they were landmines, tiptoeing and hopping through the street as only an effeminate, elderly and uncoordinated overweight white man can.

Garrison Keillor is on the radio, and despite how wonderful the sound of his voice may be I cant help but wonder if I should replace his whispering with the drip drop of the rain to unmute the silence of the morning. I’ll wait until after Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average, and cold rainy mornings like this are so commonplace that they give Garrison ample opportunity to reflect and say in his hushed, watery and drawn-out nasal-whistling way, “Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.” Because we don’t love it enough even though there is so much to love, with rainy Sunday mornings being at the top of the list.

Tonight is clear and the air smells of Cold and Snow and Smoke and Fire and I’ve gone to the window to look at the Moon but I cant see it, but I know its up there somewhere big and full because I can see the table and chairs down in the courtyard, covered in dying blanket of red and yellow and brown. If it weren’t for the moonlight I couldn’t tell one color from the other and I wouldn’t see the outlines of all the rooftops stacked up on top of each other all the way out to the river. Instead, I would only see myself reflected back and maybe someone out there would see me staring out and ask, “Who is that man in the window up there?” and that would make two of us.