Totally about my birthday

As I sit down to write this it is my birthday tomorrow. As you read this my birthday will have been yesterday. What this means functionally is that my town, Minneapolis, will have gone from an exotically beautiful Autumn paradise full of strange plants, gouts of dazzling leaves, moody winds, and unexpectedly late flowers lurking mysteriously in a chaos of gone wild Midwestern yards to a blighted black-gray lunarscape of death.

I find this a little too metaphorical for a birthday. I mean maybe when I'm 120 or something, but the way Fall spends October in buoyant, off-kilter enthusiasm, bolstering my optimism and my feeling that it could simply go on forever, and then, usually just before my birthday, almost on a whim, pulls up suddenly in a killing frost and a 30 degree drop in temperature, is always a little hard for my spirit to take. But this is the first time I can remember it having the audacity to happen directly on my birthday. The weather for my birthday, which, to capriciously invoke the calendar, is hardly even a third of the way into Autumn, is best defined by the alarm banner that shows up in any weather search of it: WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY.

Tonight the temperature will plunge 30 degrees, into the twenties! We could see four inches of snow tomorrow, though we probably won't. We'll just see everything die and start to rot into the ground, which, once we're all agreed it isn't a metaphor in any way at all, is kind of pretty in its way too.