Somewhere out there, it's November

My grandma in the northeast told me about cold winds that blew the last of the leaves off the trees. And then I remembered that it's November.

I am wearing a light short-sleeved top I got at Zara last spring. When I sat for an hour in the outdoor cafe this morning wearing no jacket, just a light silk scarf, I felt slightly chilly. The sort of chilly you don't feel any more after a two minute walk in the sun.

Now I'm sitting in my room. The room is all window, and the view is of a park with trees, a sort of communal back yard for all the little houses and for my building. The tree right under my window is fiery like a sunset. Its leaves are red on top, then blend to orange and then to yellow and finally to a bit of green. Hiding behind it is one little tree that's all bright bright red. All the rest are stubbornly green.

On my balcony, a few leaves of a strawberry plant grow in one pot, and a few flower seedlings live in another pot. It's really hard to imagine that maybe right now, in Chicago, the wind is chilling and the sky gray, and the ivy had turned a few weeks ago and its leaves have fallen off. Or that in a few weeks, in Chicago, it can start snowing or even blizzarding, like it did that one Thanksgiving. (Ah, nostalgia . . . )

My winter ski coat is hanging in my closet, waiting. It will have to wait until my boyfriend and I go traveling over winter break, but it'll be patient.