Sundays In November When the Weather Bothers Me

I don't like Mondays, but this bright grey skylight Sunday has got to end. Unfortunately, it's going to end slowly with sweeping and scrubbing and mopping. Wanting money is a horrible motivator that gets you into bad situations, like working closing shifts four nights a week three weeks in a row.

The sky is glowing the worst glow it could, an oppressively bright grey, almost white but in no way reminiscent of snow. From my room, it feels like our attic is floating in a vacuum, just us and these ugly, naked weed trees. There isn't a break in the clouds in any direction, which is all too clear thanks to my three skylights. It's smothering, how the heavens are ceaselessly reminding us of mediocrity right now. I feel horrible about life, and it's not my fault. Sundays like this are the worst.

Emma just walked into my room: "The sky's so big. There's like nothing that would make me happy right now." If I didn't have to go to work in a few minutes, I could maybe have escaped this feeling today. There are cheerier places to work on your computer or read a book. It will get dark, and the Christmas lights that have been on the trees for three days will turn on. But I'll be in a kitchen, or at a cash register, and I'll miss it.

On certain Sundays in November when the weather bothers me, I empty drawers of other summers where my shadows used to be...

Thinking about the summer won't help. Nothing will help besides maybe a shower and getting lost in a good book and some candles to lighten the atmosphere. But here's a cheerier Sunday, two weeks ago, that I forgot I took pictures of. I was in Detroit, and an apartment-warming party took place that Saturday, and I baked caramelized apple upside-down cake, which I have baked so many times in the past five years, in a cute little old oven.

It doesn't normally look exactly like this—here it's capturing the afternoon sun. That weekend's Sunday sky was less bleak than this one's, even if the steam in coming out of this street in Midtown is a little ominous:

Here, now, in Ann Arbor, the clouds broke a little, but then everything just got darker.

Emma: Whatever you do, don't look up the weather for the next ten days. It gets worse. So much worse.