A steady rain is falling along the Chesapeake today, and the sky is grey all the way upriver to the west. The clouds are low, and late-November leaves lay like wet carpet throughout the paths here at Aerie. It is cold.

I startled a heron earlier; she was hunkered down in the reeds on the edge of the marsh so that neither of us knew the other was there until the last minute, and she let out the familiar low honk as she lifted into the trees on the far side of the water and settled onto a high branch, then she immediately pulled her head down low into her body, and it was raining harder so she turned to face behind her, toward the woods, away from the wind.

The only sounds this afternoon are the rain on the water, a slight wind in the few remaining leaves, and some fishing boat through the low fog at the mouth of the river. It feels like November out. It feels like a Sunday.

When I was young I lived in a yellow house on a reservoir in central Massachusetts. This time of year I would sit at my kitchen table and look through a wall-size window across the grass and past the road to the water, and the leaves would have long been gone, and it would rain like this, or snow so that even the roof of the Old Stone Church out on Wachusett was visibly wet. I worked on a manuscript about Vincent van Gogh back then, and the late fall, early winter mood fit the subject. Days like today I desperately miss my small place, the chill coming down from the mountain reminding me of colder months ahead.

It’s lonelier here than it was there, but I don’t know why. Maybe it was more hopeful back then, and hope can certainly chase off loneliness, almost always. At least there it could. Sometimes I’d walk around to the near shore of the reservoir in the first snowfall and watch the Canada geese move by, or the occasional car come up the road from West Boylston, headed perhaps to the cider mill in Sterling, or further to the summit at Mt. Wachusett. Or sometimes I’d wander across the street to the Deacon Bench Antique Shop and talk to the workers, and someone would have brought in a dozen Country Donuts from down in town.

Up in Princeton on days like this I’d stop at a small, white shed-size store, a deli of sorts, and buy hard rolls and the Boston Globe, and I’d return to my small living room, also with a window looking out across the grass to the reservoir, and I’d read the paper, spreading it out on the plaid couch, on the wooden coffee table. I’d have already put a chicken with spices and cut up red potatoes in the oven, and it felt permanent, as if it was all designed just for me.

The Chesapeake is choppy today, and to the west the deep grey clouds announce some inevitable harder rain and cooler temperatures. I thought about heading down to the raw bar in the village to watch a game but opted to spend a little time here at my desk. I have a box of pictures behind me, and I thought it would be the right kind of day to go through them, get rid of the redundant ones, put some of my favorites in the albums still with empty sleeves. I might not pull it off the shelf again, but I will today since it is raining, and it’s good to remember other times like this when there was something more than weather in the way the raindrops hit the surface of Wachusett. Something more melodic than today’s rainfall, which seems to simply drown itself in the river.

Instead, I stood at the water for a while and watched the current, noted the incoming tide, felt the cold rain on my face which rather than dampen my mood seemed to massage my melancholy back into something akin to anticipation, to expectation.

Am I wrong to think Sundays have always been like this is some way? It’s as if the colder months were designed for Sunday afternoons, the sound of rustling leaves, a chill on the back of the neck, the familiar call of some announcer analyzing the passing game, commenting on some player’s career.

And there will be an instant replay so that we can experience it a few more times before moving on, noting what worked, what didn’t, anticipating the fourth quarter with just a small stabbing of regret for some of the plays we will never run again.