Gray

Yet warm enough to conduct our usual activities. The least hint of a cooler breeze, however, makes my mother want to cut short her walks. She's got to get tough, I tell her, or she's going to need a hazmat suit pretty soon.
From a Robert Penn Warren poem called "READING LATE AT NIGHT, THERMOMETER FALLING", published in the 1970's:
And the seasons,
Nerve-tingling heat or premonitory chill, swung
Through the year, the years swung,
and the past, great
Eater of dreams, secrets, and random data, and
Refrigerator of truth, moved
Down what green valley at a glacier's
Massive pace,

moving
At a pace not to be calculated by the trivial sun, but by
A clock more unforgiving that, at
Its distance of mathematical nightmare,
Glows forever. The ice-mass, scabbed
By earth, boulders, and some strange vegetation, moves
So imperceptively that it seems
Only more landscape.

Until,
In late-leveling light, some lunkhead clodhopper,
The clodhopper me,
The days' work done, now trudging home,
Stops.
Stares.
And there it is.
It looms.

The bulk of the unnamable and de-timed beast is now visible,
Erect, in the thinly glimmering shadow of now sun-thinned ice.
Somehow yet alive.
The lunkhead
Stares.

The beast,
From his preternatural height, unaware of
The cringe and jaw-dropped awe crouching there below, suddenly,
As if that shimmer of ice-screen had not even been there, lifts,

Into distance,
the magisterial gaze.

The mercury falls. Tonight snow is predicted. This,
However, is another country. Found in a common atlas.