Over the rushed stumble of the past five days or so, it’s suddenly not summer exactly anymore.

I almost didn’t touch the electric cooling at all this year, pressing on with my habitual method of catching every bit of the night wind instead, and shutting the place up against the sun-heat come morning. Four or five times I kicked on the not-AC (it’s a swamp cooler here), for an hour at most, and mostly to push the hot air out rather to condition it.

Now the main kitchen window is closed all the time. For a while each evening I open the screened front door to equalize things (it’s a perfect 71 as I write this). And then I crack the bedroom window to let in air that is on the edge of too cool (a predicted 54 toward dawn in the coming morning).

When I’ve blinked and risen the last few mornings, I’ve put my feet into slippers and thrown a fleecy shirt over my shoulders, at least until the coffee is made and going down freely.

Soon the door will stay closed. The bedroom window next. Then the single cotton sheet and single thin blanket will get replaced with thicker models, and next have a nice downy quilt laid over them. At some point I’ll be doing with the shutters and shades what I did not so long ago with the screened openings–inviting the sun’s warmth in to adjust things in the right direction, instead of the cool breezes of darkness.

Finally and no doubt, the fossil fuel heat will go on. When you wanna get brown, down on the ground; propane.

I’d rather be cold than hot, but there are limits for any modern human in an overdeveloped country, even aspiring primitivists.

Maybe someday there will be a furnace powered by the sun itself, active solar rather than just the passive grasping kind. Or maybe I will meet my values halfway and burn a cord of wood each winter in a Franklin stove.

Either way, I do love this time of year. It’s sleeping weather to perfection. My favorite Normie holiday, the one they call Thanksgiving, is on the way (and I remain, thank you, quite woke to both its roots both pagan and genocidal). Followed by my favorite non-Normie holiday, which needs no waking, the winter solstice, when the dark is darkest and turns its face back toward the light.

Normally that solstice is a time of deep and sluggish meditation, a frozen clump of days in a preternaturally still world. I don’t think it will be that, this year. I have too much to get done, in preparation for the Ides of March and an as-yet theoretical transition away from faculty life of the impoverished kind. This year I can’t afford to get myself any sluggery for Christmas–I’ve got to instead catch the wave of the rising light, blow on the spark, pray for the fiery rain to fall in utterly unique ashy flakes with the tang of brimstone slapping at my sinuses.

It will be weird, like any renovation project, a time of discomfort in the interests of perfect future comforts, like remodeling the bathroom in January.

Like ending a spill abruptly.