As the weather has turned cooler, it is not so strange to have rain on some days. This morning at breakfast Marco looked up from the paper, and told us this: "rain today." It has not come yet, and I have already taken my walk, so I am happy to sit here in the warm and dry comfort of the study and read my book. Juliet clears her throat, and I look up to find her beckoning to me, holding a socket wrench. I put the book down. It is usually best not to deny her when she is holding tools.

She leads me upstairs to her room. From the doorway, it looks like a giant fist has come down from the sky to shatter her things, sending them into the corners to pile up like sand. I look again: the explanation is simpler. She has taken her bed apart. She tucks the socket wrench in with her waist, and picks up a piece of bed, a slat of smooth, honey-colored wood. She hands it to me, selects her own, and leads me back downstairs.

In one place on the lee side of the house, the porch and roof bulge a bit, bowing out to create a round and sheltered space. We spend a half an hour bringing pieces of her bed down the stairs and out into this place, stacking them neatly against the wall at her direction. We spend another putting it all back together: the massive headboard, and the carved footboard, and posts, and the canopy rails. She brings me back upstairs a final time to fill her arms with bedding, and to fill mine with pillows.

As we make the bed, it begins to rain.

Juliet pulls me under the blankets. We have been working, but it is cool out, and it is cooler still under the fresh sheets. We settle together into the pillows. All around us has become rain, and now rain and wind, whispering to us in swirls. The roof protects us from this, but it seems a fragile defense. The weather stomps and shakes at us now, only paces away, and we pull the blankets tighter. It is the house that shields us, I know. With the wind shadow we are dry in the soft bed, and we are getting warmer from each other. I mean to ask Juliet something, but she puts fingers to my lips.

"Hush," she says.