My husband and I love to sleep in flannel sheets dried on an outdoor clothesline. Their scent is wonderful, and the crispness unparalleled, in our opinion.

So we do our best to extend our outdoor drying season as much as possible, watching the weather closely as autumn marches on in hopes of the right combination of sun and breeze. This can be quite the challenge with our rapidly diminishing hours of daylight.

I think I hit the limit of our line-drying season yesterday.

After consulting our local weather folks at the Fairbanks Museum for their daily outlook, clocking the temperature, and then watching the trees for wind velocity, I figured we had one more good drying day left. Well, as the traditional New England saying goes: “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”

By the time the washing machine had finished its dance, the wind was moving more than before. But not too bad, I thought.

Heh, famous last words.

By the time I got outside with the basket full of wet sheets, brown leaves were scuttling furiously over the ground, the seedy heads of spent goldenrod were bent low, and the trees had started to sigh in the wind. But still…

My husband reported that it was hilarious to watch my wrestling match with the wet bed linen. No sooner would I apply a clothespin to one end of a sheet when the wind would pick up the opposite end to wind around me like a chrysalis enveloping a caterpillar.

Ugh.

Unwind.

Pin.

Chrysalis.

Unwind.

Repeat.

Sigh.

Sometimes the better part of a windy day in November is to just give in, and make a cup of cocoa. After all, there’s always spring.