Turning toward Winter

Winter's coming.

You can tell because the days are getting rather shockingly short (it's well dark by 6 p.m., sunsets are before 6:00), the grocery stores are selling Christmas cookies (though I'm not sure that counts, since they roll those out at the beginning of September...) and they're already setting up that big artificial toboggan run thing that's part of the "Christmas market" (read: thin excuse for a highly commercialized fun fair) at Potsdamer Platz.

Also, I finally caved in and turned on the heating, though I'm sort of inanely proud to have stuck it out two thirds of the way through October. But the morning I woke up and the temperature inside read 14° C (57° F), I figured the time had come.

At least the weekend farmers' market promises to keep me stocked with strange, wonderful vegetables (salsify, anybody? Jerusalem artichoke?) through sometime into December.

It's been a time, well, mostly a time of head down, nose to the grindstone repetition, but with occasional lucid interludes of bizarre, half-improvised theater performances in the back room of a bar that looks more like an abandoned house (but they make interesting cocktails that include cucumber), where the bathroom doesn't have a sink and the girls at the ticket counter (dressed as siamese twins) don't have coins on hand, so they give me my change in gingerbread cookies. Or a free basement concert by some slightly odd Americans, where the "special guest" trumpet player turns out to be a rather famous German author and frontman of a popular band.

Between such things and the way all the windows of streets lined with shops glow warm against the early-falling dark and the fact that it's not yet too cold for a little bicycle jaunt out to the countryside to catch the moon just rising, enormous and pink above a field, I've almost reconciled myself with the changing seasons.

But I notice I'm feeling singularly grateful to have friends who live nearby and interesting things going on right here in the neighborhood, because I can tell pretty soon we're going to want to hunker down and not go far at all.