The air has been warm and the daytime skies have glowed bright and golden here lately, while the evenings have been clear, soft and moon filled, hardly the weather to match my inner image of November as cold, gray, and forboding.

I can tell it's November by other signs: I've picked the last of the season's free food from the tomato vines, and green tomatoes now crowd window sills around the house; green peppers have been picked, chopped and fozen; I've turned the vegetable garden beds and added the composted leaves from last year's leaf fall; newly fallen leaves have been raked and now moulder in the compost pile; we've disassembled the trampoline and hoisted its parts onto the rafters in the garage, leaving a huge, circular bare spot in the backyard; the NPR pledge drive has ended here, but not before there arose in my mind the thought that a commercial or two might be more bearable than this particular affiliate's hired whiners might suppose; and once again the elm by the driveway has slipped a sinuous web of its roots into a joint of the clay sewer pipe of this old house, slowing the flow of the household's discharges to a trickle.

Earlier in the week, when I found that my flat-wire snake would not clear the pipes, I feared that in the murky depths below I would find not just elm roots, but one of a homeowner's worst nightmares, mud � a sign of a collapsed sewer line. I awoke Saturday morning cursing the gods of sewers and elms and resigned to having to spend a Saturday morning wrestling with a power auger, so I headed to a local rental place that I knew had a hundred-foot machine available.

Lest anyone get the impression that I'm handy, let me say that in matters of household maintenance, I am best suited by temperament and talent to a task of the order of, say, changing the batteries in a remote control or clearing a jammed pepper mill. But I'm also frugal (cheap, to the less generous, but then I also have the "Hey-I've-got-a-kid-in-college" card in my hand); therefore, I am loath to pay a plumber two hunnert fitty bucks for a task I think I can complete in an hour for a $25 rental and pair of cheap, leather work gloves.

When I pulled the suburban assault vehicle into the drive to unload the auger, my neighbor Nelson, the father of the four blondest children on the planet, was in his yard raking leaves with the zeal of a man who would prefer to be back at the office working out the metaphysics of FreeCell game number 27653 and pondering the nature of his life in that not too distant future when he will have completed game 32000. But Nelson also performs one of the best Tim Taylor "argh, aarrgghh, AARRGGHH!" imitations I've heard, and he set one loose to indicate his auger envy as he volunteered to help me hoist the Metro-sized behemoth out of the minivan.

Nelson's interest in my sewer line persisted throughout my morning plumbing adventure. He helped me horse it up the back stoop and down into the basement (and up and out again when we had finished). Down inside the bowels of our house (a clean, well-lighted place, in fact), I initiated him into the Order of the Auger, training him in the auger's operation and its dangers, and he shared in that glorious moment when a wonderful sucking sound struck our ears after the auger cut through a macrame of elm roots and the wastes in the sewer line began the journey downstream into the Kansas River, the Missouri, the Mighty Mississippi, and finally the Gulf Stream. Nelson suggested that long view. Having grown up as the son of a Swedish hog farmer, he advocates keeping an eye on the bacon, the chop, and the ham while slogging through the sty. His help and his good humor made an abysmally dreary chore less so.

Reading:
The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time, Phyllis Rose. I'm certain that I am no longer entitled to claim that I'm reading this book.

Watching:
A Month by the Lake, an odd little folly, worth a look for the Lake Como vistas.

Watching and Listening: The World Series. Cheering the Yankees on is much easier when the Steinbrenner stays out of the news.