Archive note: Originally published for the week of September 28, 2026. The weather references below belong to that week; this is not a current forecast.
Fall will be visiting West Virginia Monday and Tuesday before summer realizes it left something here.
That was the assessment of Earl “Radar” Mullins, who advised residents to keep both the hoodie and the air conditioner where they could reach them.
The prospect of another hot afternoon prompted immediate disagreement inside households that had already declared fall.
One resident had purchased a decorative blanket. Another had made chili. Neither considered those decisions reversible merely because the thermometer wanted to argue.
“You can’t put the leaves back on the trees,” one homeowner said, while reopening a window she had closed that morning.
Earl clarified that several trees still had their leaves and that this was not how temperature worked.
The homeowner said the pumpkins were already out.
Fall decorating continues under protest
Across the holler, seasonal preparations proceeded despite the weather. Porch mums received extra water. Flannel shirts were worn with the sleeves pushed up. A man carrying firewood paused to turn the fan toward himself.
Earl described the situation as a disagreement between the season people wanted and the season waiting in the parking lot.
“The calendar is indoors,” he said. “It doesn’t know.”
His principal concern was the jacket migration: coats leaving home in the morning and accumulating in vehicles by afternoon, until a household owned six jackets and could find none of them at breakfast.
He recommended retrieving them before the next cool spell, provided doing so did not require admitting whose responsibility they were.
At the weather desk, Earl left the forecast confidence at 37 percent and placed his own hoodie over the back of a chair.
He returned ten minutes later for it.
The office air conditioner was still on.
The Holler Herald — West Virginia’s Least Reliable News Source.
