It's been warm out there this week -- been up in the 80s, unusual for October. The trees are at their peak and everybody should've been happy. Of course, the old complainers who sit and nurse their coffee in the Chatterbox Cafe found a way to complain about it after all.

It's been cloudy. It's been chilly out there. The sun has come out now and then. And then on Thursday this powerful wind came up -- it was very dramatic. Some people lost phone service and weren't even aware of it at the time and leaves blew off some of the trees completely.

It's the week of the fall equinox, when we turn towards the darkness -- and we have this week. It's been chilly, it's been cloudy, and the sun -- less of it. The sun going down, people eating dinner by lamplight again and all sorts of odd things happening when the darkness comes on us.

It's the beginning of fall. It's been cool -- good sleeping weather when people crawl into bed at night. It's warm under the extra blanket if you're sleeping with somebody else and you tuck yourself into your little envelope on these cool fall nights.

For a while I grew up the son of a Swedish sharecropper in North Dakota and I got on a toboggan in January and there was a prevailing wind out of the northwest which blew me down to Minneapolis and it just seemed like too much effort to go back. And they didn't seem as if they would miss me anyway so I stayed here.

Fall is in the air. The last of the gardens being brought in--bumper crops of tomatoes. Irene Bunsen had the great satisfaction this week of walking out of her back gate, out of her garden, and across the alley, and down the way, and into the back gate of her brother-in-law Clarence Bunsen.

It's gotten very cold there this last week. The temperature's been highs in the 20s. Cold, bitterly cold weather. It's the kind of weather we're used to. The Northern Lights have been so beautiful--these tongues of green, tips of orange at night.

We've had snow out there. We had about a foot and a half of snow here this last week, which just sort of killed some people who are just tired of winter. But it snowed anyway, despite their objections.

We got a little snow out there this last week -- six inches, but we don't care. We're not shoveling. The shovel's been put away. The snowplow is parked in the garage; Bud is not going to bring it out. That snow, it's just going to have to melt on its own.

The tundra swans came in this week -- hundreds of them. Beautiful white birds came sailing in and landed on the lake. They spend the winter in North Carolina -- most of them -- and they're on their way up to their breeding grounds, which is in the Canadian arctic.