Mornings are dark lately. I have to turn on a light before I get out of bed. My morning routine is getting harder and harder, even as I go to bed earlier and don’t drink before bedtime and don’t snack, etc. It’s just Autumn.

I know a woman whose name is the same as a season. Let’s say Spring, though it is not Spring. And in the few years I’ve known her, I’ve heard no fewer than four different people — also adults — make her name into a comment on the weather. I think that might be the worst. Weather small talk is bad enough, name small talk is bad enough, mix the two and how is this woman smiling at all, ever? I guess she’s aptly named. Like if I was named Storm Cloud.

This morning it rained and rained and rained but by noon it was sunny. My kids came out of school each wearing one of the other’s rain boots. Neither noticed until I pointed it out. One size 1 and one size 12. This morning they were mad and grumpy — maybe because their boots didn’t fit? — but by three o’clock they were happy.

There was soccer practice for Eli in the park at 5:30. Arlo ran around the outer perimeter of the park, lapping all the other soccer practices, his red hoody bobbing in and out of view. At one point, a rainbow appeared in the sky. All the five year old boys stopped playing soccer to stare at it. Arlo stopped next to me, panting. “I’m going to see if I can find the end,” he said, and took off running again.

“Imagine thousands of years ago,” said the soccer dad next to me on the bench. “What must people have thought when they saw rainbows appear in the sky.”

What would you think if you had nothing to explain a bright band of colours lighting up the sky. I would make up a story about seven gods who tired of the sky being only blue or only black and starry, who were bored bouncing on trampoline clouds all day, so they went to the other side of the earth and fetched giant buckets of paint and giant paintbrushes and they each made a beautiful streak of colour across the sky.

Art is important.

Eli has brought home reams of paper from school; almost all are drawings of square-bodied Minecraft characters holding sticks and saws and pickaxes. (One was a sheet of paper with only the word C A N D E printed neatly on it.) Dark crayon swirls over the heads of these poor people as they try to make their worlds out of nothing at all. I am hopeful his kindergarten teacher has heard of Minecraft (and understands that he does not play it, merely watches other people play it)(usually on youtube)(this counts as entertainment) otherwise I am afraid I will get a call to meet with the guidance counsellor about my son’s Violent Art.

How do I end this post? I have to cover the barbecue because it will probably rain again tonight and a wet barbecue invites mildew and terrible flavours.

The end.