We came back from a rainy trip to Ohio to find the East Coast so parchingly hot and dry, in the traditional late summer drought, that even the marigolds had wilted. (I didn't know marigolds *could* wilt.)

But that's all changed now! It's hurricane weather today! The wind is blowing - not too strong, but sturdy, and just handsomely enough that the trees toss their heads scornfully at it; the air feel like the sea-shore early in the morning before the sun has warmed the land, cool and sweet and clean like a fluffy blanket around you after a long day in the water. Sometimes I even imagine that I smell a touch of salt and dead fish on a gust. The sky is clouded over, but crowded over not with flat gray stratus but with fluffy busy patchwork cumulus that just let the sun sigh through like water-color, and the barometer reads high enough that there's a general feeling of whistling well-being. The rain - when it comes - is little spattering showers, leaving the ground dry under the trees. So far.

It's my favorite sort of weather. And, I think, perfect for reading Swallows and Amazons in for the first time.

Perhaps, if the hard rain holds off, I will try to camp out in the back-yard and test a tarp-rope-trees-and-rocks rig against the wind and damp.

Tell me that this ( picture ) which I photographed at the train station this morning, does not look exactly like the greater tree squid. It was even more obvious in real life; I could watch it tossing its limbs around in the wind.

But I thought arboreal cephalopods in the US were restricted to the Pacific Northwest. Are we getting invasives coming north with the longer hurricane seasons and global warming?