The big cold front started to tickle the Piedmont yesterday afternoon. It is coming southeast from the great Midwest and causing things to happen. The down-filled coats came out for the first time. They were not really needed until this morning, but the flat-screen treated us to a view of Marquette, Michigan, with images of the first snow that stayed overnight. The season is just making it’s arrival noted but still tentative. Our pal down in Tidewater reported the humidity was at a perfect level to coat the roof with a uniform layer of frost. We are done with growing for a few months and the Cold will embrace us periodically until the miracle of Spring.

That naturally led to a discussion of warmer places. The Salts around the Fire Ring near the Bunk House at Refuge Farm were only out long enough to allow a cigarette to burn rapidly and get back inside by the fire. The smoke thankfully went up the chimney. The favorite topic this morning for warmth was not our usual “Floridian” thing. The recent passage of Hurricane Ian burned us out with some ironic laughter about previous plans for other refuges in the Sunshine State. We remembered one Key West day-on-Duvall Street following author Marlow after a couple cocktails at Sloppy Joes. the water in the street was above the ankle. That sort of storm was common and fairly mild, not like the savagery of Ian’s passage and moves the houses around.

At length, we decided that the Piedmont of Virginia was a preferable locale and let the lease go on the apartment where Marlow once lived. Life choices, you know?

This morning we were wrestling with the final version of the manuscript for the “Last Cruise of the Cold War.” We had slogged through the adventures of the training exercises in the Caribbean, the TRANSLANT east across an ocean and the entry into Homer’s Wine Dark Sea of the Med. Then, the Summit in which an American President and a Soviet Premier met to cool the jets on the endless bi-polar chill of a half-century of mostly peaceful conflict transpired off Malta.

“War Over, Wall Down!” were the headlines after the Kings swept away to their lofty affairs and we returned to our normal business maintaining a wary peace. Despite what followed over the next few decades, we generally agree that lurching toward “peace” is preferable to whatever it is we are doing now. Talk this morning is whether we can expect an atomic event in the next few days.

Timing is everything, and should go without comment. The American election is only three weeks away. Normally a fairly mild event, this one is expected to have the equivalent of a European “No Confidence” vote. The desire to affect it is powerful. It has been a common theme to blame the Russians or the Chinese on trifling with the last election, and ejecting the last President from the White House. On this next election, speculation was that we might see an “atomic demonstration” of some sort. There is a broad range of options, ranging from a relatively harmless demonstration blast over the Black Sea to the dramatic obliteration of a Ukrainian city. So you can imagine there was some bemusement similar to finding new positions as close to the interior fireplace as possible.

Old topics surfaced with the memories and the places. A visit to Cyprus, for example, and a glimpse of Syria from the air. Or the mystery of the staircase up from the harbor at Santorini, Greece. Only one of us had been there, and he opined the narrow trail up to the heights was best achieved on the back of a donkey. Depending on the weather, of course. When warm and going up, the donkey droppings added a particular aura to the trip.

We were briefly confused by the chill air and the memory of days of warmth. We have avoided the use of the terms “weather” and “climate,” since those two immutable forces change over time. Only in human affairs do they have dramatic “tipping points” as we experience what is actually happening on the edge of Human Affairs. We were going to die from Cold when this all started back in the 1970s. Then we were going to fry in sudden heat caused by driving into town to get groceries. The latest change is that it is changing and neither short-term like weather, or eternal like the Climate.

We will see the trajectory curves over the next couple weeks. What goes up, you know?

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