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Of all the months of the year, November most closely resembles a hangover.
This is not just because it follows the twin bacchanals of Oktoberfest and Halloween. It's also due to the fact that here in the Northland average high temperatures are plummeting and days are growing shorter at a pace that's often associated with the Kentucky Derby.
The trees have shed their Technicolor autumn wardrobe, and migratory waterfowl are booking airline flights for the Gulf coast. Another sure sign of the impending winter is that our cat, Sparkles, has transitioned from a rugged semi-feral outdoor feline to a pampered stay-indoors-at-all-costs housecat.
Sparkles has a cozy, cat-sized bed that sits next to our living room TV. She spends approximately 23 hours per day in her bed, either sleeping or catnapping. We know that she has fallen asleep when she begins to snore like a logging truck. She spends the remaining hour of each day sitting at our feet and using her cat mind waves to convince us that she really needs to nap on a lap.
If the weather is nice and I see that Sparkles is awake, I will ask her if she wants to go outside. She will invariably respond by snuggling her head deep into her bed and covering her little noggin with a front leg.
I might gently put Sparkles outdoors when weather is balmy. She will sit on the deck for a few minutes, blinking in the brilliant sunlight, before moseying off to investigate recent reports of local mouse-related shenanigans.
After she's had enough of the great outdoors, Sparkles will plop her fuzzy heinie down by the front door and meow piteously. She will also beam powerful cat mind waves into our brains, leaving us with no choice but to open the door and let her in. She will saunter through the doorway with a regal air that seems to say, "It's about time! It's so difficult to find dependable staff these days."
Another sure sign of the impending winter is that my wife has been bitten by the Christmas decoration bug.
These days when we walk down a street or through a shopping center or just visit a friend's home, my wife will frequently stop and regard a Christmas-related item and coo, "Ooh, isn't that cute? We need one of those!"
This despite that we already have enough Yuletide items in storage to make Santa's workshop look like an old, abandoned K-Mart.
Among the latest things that we simply could not live without are a small lighted ceramic Christmas tree and some Christmas-themed gift bags. At my wife's urging, I purchased a spool of colorful outdoor Christmas lights.
I was fooled by the extremely reasonable price of the spool which, I later discovered, contained some 500 individual LED lights. Only when I began to string up the lights did I learn that they stretched for nearly a quarter of a mile.
We've all seen television shows where homeowners compete to see who can construct the most audacious outdoor Christmas display. The kind of display where folks light up not only their houses but also several adjoining acres. Displays that are so luminous that they can be seen from low earth orbit.
That was not my goal; I'm far too lazy to tackle such an ambitious undertaking. My sole intention was to string up those 500 lights without resorting to simply laying a bunch of them on the ground and muttering, "The heck with it! That's good enough."
After I had strung lights above and around our house's largest window, I examined the wire spool. It looked as though I hadn't even made a dent. Panic began to set in, so I stretched some lights across the front of the house. The spool continued to mock me with its stubborn abundance of wires and lights.
I strung lights across a deck rail, spiraled them down one post, and up another. Gripped by a growing sense of desperation and frustration, I grabbed a steel shepherd's hook that had been used to suspend potted plants. Thinking that it could serve as a crude facsimile of a lighted candy cane, I wrapped the hook with several layers of wire and lights. At long last, the spool went empty.
The result is a haphazard, higgledy-piggledy arrangement of small yet colorful LED Christmas lights. My wife took one look at the fruits of my labors and exclaimed, "That's wonderful! You did a great job!"
Bless her heart. She's the sweetest person on the planet.
But she was right about one thing. Those cheery little Christmas lights are the perfect antidote for the hangover that's known as November.
-- Jerry's book, "Dear County Agent Guy," can be found at Amazon.com and in bookstores nationwide.