8 gray, sodden days whipped with monsoon-like hours that leave us all dripping with shoes squishing like a kindergartener by a puddle.  Umbrellas become an extension of our hands, a third arm that we fold and unfold when coming and going, and the contents of closets lay scattered in the entry way as we root for boots and coats that haven't seen the light of day since last April.  Commutes become a corkscrew of meanderings when parkways flood and we play double dare with ourselves as to the depth of the water that stands in the way of getting home. At the same time, we are all extremely aware of how un-Katrina like our suffering is and we tighten our raincoat belts and sail out into the weather without too much complaint.

Today the sun is out! It's just on the edge of cool, with still too much humidity reminiscent of August. Our seasonal geography is all askew; I can't understand why it's past Columbus Day and my neighbor's huge fountain of a weeping tree is as green as mid-July. Here and there are scattered patches of crimson like autumnal mending, but there are no scarlet maples and cadmium yellow birches. The trees that are the first to turn are muddy brown like burnt sienna mixed with pthallo green. I don't think there will be a Kodachrome of fall this year and all the papers are filled with stories of the whys and wherefores: global warming, the drought, now the monsoon, the impact on the tourist industry, how we will have to travel north of Toronto in 20 years to remember a New England autumn.

I prefer to take it one autumn at a time. I'm not so sad to have the warmer temperatures linger. One look at the news clips from Denver's snowfall has made me shiver and I feel myself retracting under my skin into a tight little iceberg of winter worries. I'll take the extra four weeks on the porch - if the sodden cushions ever dry out, that is. I've folded up the umbrella and put away the ugly, sensible rain shoes. Today I will wear my cherry red suede flats and a quilted red vest as my concession to the season that is being so coy with us, refusing to settle in, like a butterfly hunting for more colorful flowers on which to light.

Tonight my mother and a sister are coming for dinner. I forget to take out the big pork loin, so now it is a waterbath to defrost quickly. I have yams, parsnips, baby red potatoes, and onions to roast with olive oil, garlic, sea salt, ground pepper, and rosemary. I have two huge garden tomatoes that I will roast in a separate dish with sea salt, pepper, and olive oil. When the tomatoes roast into collapsed mounds,  I'll spread them on the round, flat foccaccia I bought at the Italian deli, grate parmigiana reggiano over it, add a little more oil, wrap it all in foil and let it bake for twenty minutes. Dessert is questionable as I have nothing in the house.

Right now I am waiting for a computer tech to show up to see if he can fix the laptop. I have a feeling he'll tell me I have to send it to the Toshiba factory, in which case I'll be unfit for company because I'm sure I'll never see it again. Does anyone have words of advice as to why my CD burner, practically never used, refuses to let me write my files as back up? Why can't I go back to the old days when a diskette and switch to drive D was a matter of seconds instead of the cumbersome interplay between two programs who won't cooperate?

I'm going off to sew before my urge to run to the Apple store causes a rift, or worse, divorce.  I suppose less than two years with an expensive laptop is too soon to throw in the towel, but if it was a car, I know my husband would be whistling another tune.