The first cold morning of fall arrived on a Tuesday, and I was the only one who was ready for it.

I know this because I woke at six, felt the cold through the blanket, and was glad. That’s the test. If the cold annoys you, fall hasn’t really arrived yet. When the cold is welcome, when you lie there for a moment taking inventory of a chilly bedroom and the certainty that the kitchen floor is going to be worse, that is when fall is actually here.

I took stock: cold bedroom, cold floor incoming, the smell through the window screen of neighbor’s leaves coming down. October has a smell. I’ve been noticing it for seventy-three years and still cannot describe it, but I know when I’ve arrived. I got up. I was ready.

Don was not yet cold.

This was the beginning of what I will call the Annual Discussion, because to call it an argument would be inaccurate, and to call it a negotiation would be too flattering to its structure. The Annual Discussion happens every year in early fall. It has no start time and no agenda. I have been conducting it in this house for forty-seven years and have not yet won it on the first morning.

“It’s only October,” Don said.

He said this while wearing the fleece vest he had retrieved from the hall closet sometime before I woke up. So the evidence was clear. He was cold. He simply did not want to be the first to acknowledge it, because acknowledgment would mean it was time, and time would mean the furnace, and the furnace in October would mean some kind of depletion that Don believes in the way he believes things he learned from his father: quietly, firmly, without much supporting evidence.

“But it IS October,” I said.

Don has a way of nodding when he has heard something and decided not to engage with it. It is the most effective argument strategy I have encountered in fifty-two years, and I have never found a counter to it.

“We could put on sweaters,” he said.

Here is where I need to tell you about the sweaters.

I put them away in April. Every April, I put the sweaters in the blue bins, the blue bins go in the spare room closet, and that is where they are. The blue bins were not in the spare room closet. The spare room closet contained: the blue bins from the previous year, which turned out to be full of Christmas decorations; three board games the grandchildren stopped playing when they got their phones; and something in a black garbage bag that I believe is a lamp but have decided not to investigate further.

I checked the bedroom closet. The hall closet. The closet in what we call the office, which is the room where objects go when there is no longer a reasonable answer to where they should go. I found two sweaters. One had a stain of unclear origin. The other said Westerville Hardware 1994 on the front, which meant it belonged to Don, which meant that the sweater situation was currently Don 1, Phyllis 0, and that was not the direction I needed things to go.

Don came in from the garage.

“Did you find a sweater?”

I have what my sons call “the face.” It is an expression I developed for classroom management in 1980, and it communicates, without words, that a situation is being approached incorrectly. I have not needed to explain it in forty-six years. I did not explain it Tuesday.

“The sweaters,” I said, “are in the blue bins.”

“Where are the blue bins?”

“That,” I said, “is the question.”

Don has been in the garage since he retired, building things nobody asked for, which is exactly the right occupation for a man with time on his hands. He is good at locating things that have migrated to places they should not be. This is not a skill I would have anticipated in an accountant, but here we are.

Don suggested the basement. I suggested that if the sweaters were in the basement it was because someone had moved them there, and that person was not me. Don went to the basement. I stood in the kitchen, made a second cup of coffee, and looked at the thermostat, which read sixty-four degrees and was doing nothing about it.

I believe the following about the thermostat: we have owned it for thirty years, in a house we have owned for forty-seven years. I was a school principal for twenty-two years and managed a building of sixteen hundred students and a hundred and twenty staff. The thermostat does not require a committee. Heat is for when the house is cold. That is why we have heat. Don’s father did not turn his furnace on until November, on principle, because his generation treated discomfort as a form of character development, but I went to Ohio State and I have a graduate degree in educational administration and I am not building character at six-thirty in the morning in my own kitchen.

Don came back from the basement carrying four blue bins.

“Third one,” he said.

I found the gray sweater. The good one, the one I wear every October and November. Don says it looks like something from a British drama where everyone is cold indoors and talking around what they actually mean. He is not wrong, and I don’t mind. I put it on. There is something about the first sweater of fall that is its own small event, a minor ceremony nobody names.

Then it occurred to me that we had arrived, officially, at soup weather, at the beginning of the season when a quiet dinner for two is the right answer to the dark coming earlier and the temperature dropping and the yard doing whatever it does in October when nobody’s quite paying attention. The pot roast goes in Thursday. I have been making it for forty years. I do not need the recipe.

Don adjusted the thermostat. Without being asked. He set it to sixty-eight degrees.

I did not say anything about this.

I have been married fifty-two years. I know when a settlement has been reached.

I also know exactly where the blue bins are going next April, and I know I will put them there, and I know that in October of 2027 this will happen again, and I find, to my mild surprise, that this does not bother me. The Annual Discussion is a feature, not a defect. Forty-seven years of the same argument means forty-seven years of the same October, which is to say forty-seven falls, which is to say a life with someone who still makes you slightly crazy and retrieves the sweaters from the basement without being asked.

There are worse outcomes.