For the last little while, I've been going through some of the older episodes and deactivating them to make room. So last week, I opened up an older episode to do exactly that, and my finger just hovered over the button. And then I thought, not this one.And it wasn't a super popular episode. It didn't have more than an average number of listens. I was just very fond of that story.It was called Sweater Weather. And I said it in a tiny mountain town called Whistlepine. I made the whole place up.And when I was writing it, I remember wishing it was real. I'm not the only one. A few listeners mentioned how much they liked that episode. So tonight, we're going back. It's been a year. It's mid-October again.The first truly cold night when everyone digs their sweaters out of the closet. The knitting circle is still meeting in the back room of a little yarn shop called Tangled Up in Blue. We're going to drop in, catch up with a few old friends, and meet someone new.And then we'll stay a while until the lights go out and the town falls asleep. And so will you. And if you never heard the first episode, that's fine.You don't need it. And like all our stories, you never have to follow along closely. You don't have to remember anyone's name.Just let the town get sleepy. And let yourself get sleepy with it. But before we start, my usual reminder, this episode uses hypnotherapy and relaxation techniques.So please make sure that you are somewhere safe, preferably in your own comfortable bed, and not anywhere. You need to stay alert. And if you're curious about those older deactivated episodes, they aren't entirely gone. Every single one of them lives in the Snoozeville Sleep Club. And that's a premium feed with no space limits. And the episodes there can run a little longer too.And if that sounds like something you'd enjoy. All the details are in the show notes. But now it's time to get you settled. If you haven't already, turn off the lights. Pull your blankets up the way you like them. And if there's a pillow that isn't quite in the right place, fix it now.If you need to shift a little or stretch or move your legs to find the right spot, go ahead. Let the room be dark. Let it be quiet or as quiet as it gets.Maybe there's a TV on in another room or voices or a car going by outside. And if that's distracting you, don't fight it. Just notice it.That's the TV. That's a car. And let it go and come back to my voice.Your brain can only really follow one voice at a time. Tonight, let it follow this one. And if you'd like, take one slow breath in and then let it out a little longer than it came in.That's all. Just one. And then let your breathing go back to doing whatever it wants.There's nothing left to take care of today. Any dishes left can wait. Your notifications can wait.Whatever you didn't get to will still be there tomorrow. It belongs to tomorrow. Tonight is for rest.In a moment, I'm going to take you to a little town in the mountains on the first cold night of the year. You don't have to picture it perfectly. And you don't have to remember who anyone is. Let my voice carry the story and let your mind wander along behind it. And if you drift off part way through, that's not missing anything. That's the whole idea.And now, let's go back. Whistlepine is a small ski town in the Rocky Mountains. 800 people, one main street, and mountains so close on every side that the sun drops behind them by the middle of an October afternoon.It's been a year since we were last here. From above, not much has changed. The same smoke rises from the same chimneys.The creek still runs fast and cold through the middle of town. The ski lift still hangs empty on the mountain. Too early for snow.Down on the a few things are different. Murphy's Hardware has a new red roof. The empty shop beside the bookstore has paper taped over its windows and a hand-lettered sign.Tea shop opening soon. The little maple outside the inn, a skinny thing last fall, has grown enough to drop real leaves on the front step. And today is the first cold day of the year.The first real one. Everyone knew it was coming, but it still catches them off guard. People walk faster down Main Street. Hands in pockets. Chins tucked into collars. Scarves that spent the summer folded in drawers are out again.Halfway down the street between the hardware store and the ski shop is a yarn shop called Tangled Up in Blue. Sign is painted by hand with little balls of yarn painted around the edges. Inside the walls are shelves floor to ceiling and every shelf is full of wool, deep reds, forest greens, creamy whites.Maggie owns it. She's run it for nine years. For six of those years, twice a week, she's hosted a knitting circle in the back room. She calls it the Stitch and Sip. She never advertised it. A few people started showing up and then a few more and they never stopped.The back room is small. A curtain of wooden beads hangs in the doorway and clicks whenever anyone walks through. The chairs don't match. One is a velvet armchair with a sag in the seat. One is a kitchen chair painted yellow. One is a rocking chair that squeaks.There's a wood stove in the corner, a coffee pot on the side table, and a plate of snickerdoodles that never stays full for long. Someone strung fairy lights along the top shelf two Christmases ago. Nobody ever took them down. Tonight, there are 11 people here. On a warm night in July, there might be four. The cold always brings them in.Near the stove sits a big man. He's a logger, or he was for most of his life. Wide shoulders, thick hands with a scar across one knuckle, a beard going gray. His chair is too small for him and he's used to that. Last October, he sat in the same spot working on his first real project. A tiny sweater for a granddaughter who hadn't been born yet. Took him weeks. He dropped stitches constantly. The granddaughter arrived in December.She's walking now. Tonight, his needles move fast, faster than almost anyone else in the room. He's knitting her a sweater in two colors at once, cream and a deep red, with a row of small moose marching around the chest.It's called color work and it's hard. You carry one color behind the other and if you pull too tight, the whole thing puckers. He doesn't pull too tight.He's knit almost every night since last fall. He counts under his breath at the start of each moose and then he stops counting because his hands know the way. Across from him, curled sideways in the velvet armchair, is a teenager.Her hair was electric blue last year. Now it's a dark green, the color of pine needles. Same small silver ring in her nose, same black nail polish chipped to the edges.Last October, she barely said a word. She sat. She knit.She listened. Tonight, she won't stop talking. She's telling the woman beside her all about a game on her Switch, the little handheld game console she carries everywhere. Something about an island she's building from scratch. A raccoon who keeps lending her money and then wanting it back. Fruit trees.A museum she has to fill with fish. The woman listening is the silver-haired one who taught her how to fix a dropped stitch last year. She's 71 and has never played a video game in her life.She nods at all the right places. She asks how the raccoon is doing. She seems to care about the answer.The teenager isn't making fingerless gloves in soft charcoal wool. Fingerless so that she can wear them and still play. She's on the second glove now.The thumb is the hard part. You set some stitches aside and then come back for them later and she keeps forgetting which ones. There's a newer face in the circle this year.A young woman with red windburn cheeks and hair that was clearly cut at home. It's just a little shorter on one side. She hasn't noticed.She's pretty and hasn't noticed that either. She's Australian. Every fall young people from Australia turn up in towns like this on working holiday visas.Most come for the ski season. They run the lifts, teach lessons, pour beer, and clean hotel rooms. The mountain won't open for another month. So for now she's pouring coffee at the pine cone cafe and waiting for snow. She has never needed a scarf in her life. Tonight she's knitting her first one.The yarn is bright orange and thick as rope from the bargain bin by the door. Her stitches are all over the place. Some are loose enough to put a finger through.Some are so tight she has to force the needle in. Every few minutes she holds it up to look at it and laughs. A big loud laugh that makes the whole room smile.She brought a packet of chocolate biscuits tonight. The last one from a care package her mom mailed from home. She set them on the plate beside the snickerdoodles and they were gone in four minutes. In the rocking chair, the one that squeaks, sits a woman with a sharp gray bob and very good boots. She ran a company in the city for 20 years. She retired three years ago and found out fast that she had no idea what to do with her time.Last year she was fighting a scarf. The scarf won. This year her stitches are small and even.She's making a baby hat out of soft white cotton. It's her fourth this week. Once a month she drives a bag of them to the hospital in the city, to the unit where babies arrive too early and too small.She doesn't talk about it. If someone asks, she says it's just practice. All evening she's been watching the Australian scarf.Every loose stitch makes her wince. Twice she started to lean over and twice she stopped herself. The third time she doesn't stop.She sets down her hat, reaches across and shows the girl how to wrap the yarn around her finger so it runs even. Just once. Then she picks her hat back up.The Australian tries it. The next row is better. Not good.Better. She holds it up for the room to see and the woman in the rocking chair almost smiles. Around the rest of the circle other needles are working too. Someone is finishing a pair of grey mittens. Someone is on square 41 of a blanket.One square a week since last winter. Most of these people would never have met anywhere else. Out front Maggie rings up a sail, straightens a basket and glances back through the beads. The room she built by accident is full again. Outside the cold settles in harder. Inside the stove ticks.Then it's nine o'clock and the evening starts to come apart the way it always does, slowly. Yarn gets wound back into balls. Needles slide into cases.The teenager pulls on one finished glove and leaves the other in her bag. The Australian wraps half a scarf around her neck. It is lumpy and far too short but she wears it out the door anyway.Nobody really wants to go. Coats go on one sleeve at a time. Someone remembers one more thing to say.The logger holds the door and the cold rushes in and everyone recoils at it and then laughs. And on the sidewalk the Australian stops and breathes out hard and watches her breath cloud under the streetlight. She does it again.The logger waits beside her until she's done and then he nods goodnight and walks off toward his truck. Maggie locks the door behind the last of them. She turns off the lights in the back room.The fairy lights stay on a moment longer and then those go too. Main street is empty now. The stores went dark one by one while the circle was packing up.The hardware store first and then the bookstore and then the market where a boy in a green apron dragged the pumpkins in off the sidewalk and locked the door behind him. Now the only lights left are the street lamps, one on each corner and the glow from the wind at the far end of the street. The cold is getting into everything.It's in the metal railings outside the post office. It's in the wooden benches. It's in the sidewalk itself. A dry hard cold you can feel through the soles of your shoes. By midnight there will be a thin crust of frost on every windshield in town. In the morning people will stand beside their cars scraping at it and grumbling the same as every year.The inn still has people in it. Through the front windows the dining room is half full. There's a fire going in the big stone fireplace.Bowls of stew. Thick slices of bread. Someone at the bar laughs at something in the sound carries through the glass.The door opens and two people step out zipping their jackets up to their chins. They say good night and walk off in different directions. The door swings shut behind them.A pickup truck comes down the hill with its headlights on. It slows at the stop sign. Turns and climbs away again toward the houses in the trees. A big man driving with one hand. A canvas bag on the seat beside him. The taillights go around the bend and they're gone.Past the end of Main Street the town spreads out along the creek. Houses tucked in among the pines. Steep metal roofs built for snow.Wood piles stacked high under the eaves. Almost every chimney has smoke coming out of it tonight. It rises straight up into the still air.Thin and white and then flattens out and drifts once it clears the tops of the trees. The creek runs through all of it. You can hear it from almost anywhere in town. It comes down off a glacier high on the mountain and even now the water is so cold it aches. It moves fast over the rocks. Loud and steady.The same sound all day and all night. People who have lived here long enough stop hearing it. People who move away say it's the first thing they miss.In a town this small from the Hill Road you can see nearly every house and on a night like this you can almost count them going dark. In a house near the school an upstairs window glows the light of a small screen. Somewhere in there on an island that doesn't exist a raccoon is being paid back.Then the screen clicks off and the window goes dark. And in a long low building of staff housing near the bottom of the ski hill one room still has its light on. A bright orange scarf, lumpy and too short, hangs from a hook on the back of the door.And then that light goes out too on a quiet street by a church. A pair of very good boots stands side by side in a front hall and beside them a paper bag folded over at the top full of tiny white hats ready for the drive. To the city and at the yarn shop nothing moves at all.The beaded curtain hangs still. The wood stove has gone cold. The fairy lights are off.On the low table in the back room someone has left a single snickerdoodle on the plate the way people always leave the last one. And at the end the last of the dinner crowd heads home. The guests who are staying the night climb the creaky stairs to their rooms.Fire in the big fireplace burns down to a bed of red coals. The bartender wipes down the bar, stacks the chairs, and turns off the lights. All but one small lamp at the front window.That one stays on all night. It always has. Now there's almost nothing moving in Whistlepine.An elk steps out of the trees at the edge of town. A big cow elk, heavy and slow. She walks down the middle of an empty side street, her hooves loud on the pavement. Her breath coming out in clouds. She stops at someone's front yard and eats what's left of their garden. A few late carrots, some kale gone tough in the cold.Nobody comes out to chase her off. She finishes, looks around, and walks back into the trees the way she came. Far away, down the valley, a train is coming.The rail line runs along the river the way it has for more than a hundred years. You hear the train before you see anything. A low long horn rolling up the valley and bouncing back off the mountains.So it seems to come from everywhere at once. Then the rumble. It goes on for a long time.Car after car after car. Freight. Heading west to the coast.The sound rises and holds and slowly fades. Then it's gone and the quiet it leaves behind is deeper than the quiet before. Only a few lights left now.A porch light here and there. The lamp at the inn. The street lamps on Main Street.Making their small circles on the empty sidewalk. The mountains stand around the town on every side. Black against the sky.Above them the stars are out. More than you'd ever see in a city. So many that the sky looks crowded.The cold settles deeper and higher far above the town. Above the last of the trees. Where the mountain is only rock.Something begins. Snow. Just a few flakes at first.Small and dry. They land on bare rock and don't melt. They land on the tops of the silent lift towers.They land on the high empty ski runs. A few at a time. Nobody in town sees it.Everyone is asleep. But in the morning they'll step outside with their coffee. Look up and see the peaks gone white.And they'll stand there for a moment holding their cups and think the same thing everyone here thinks every year. Here it comes. Down in the valley.It's all quiet now. The smoke from the chimneys. Rising and drifting.The creek running cold and steady over the rocks. The dark shapes of the pines. The one lamp left on in the window of the inn and far above it. The snow falling on the mountain. Slow, soft, silent, and falling. And the whole town asleep beneath it.