It’s going to be a nice night to Trick or Treat for children and for their parents to get crazy and dance around the bonfires or walk from the Pioneer to the Fogcutter bars in costume. Also, we get an extra hour of sleep tomorrow so that’s nice, sort of. (Chip just said “now instead of getting up at quarter to five I’ll get up at quarter to four.”) The weather is supposed to turn cold and snow is in the forecast next week, so I really better get the the geraniums potted for indoors and the dahlia bulbs inside and dry. Then I think we will take a bike ride, and babysit tonight. Which is a short way of saying it’s good to be at home.
Chip’s cousin’s son Jack is visiting on his way home to Colorado after a summer of working in Alaska. He’s a mason. Yesterday he built a tower with Ivy. ( I mean Anna. She has been in her “Frozen” character costume for about two weeks.) The game was really nothing special, but then it became so as I thought of my friend waiting to have her leg operated on up in a hotel room far from here, and another friend, a brave and beautiful poet and teacher, who is on the ferry right now headed north from Bellingham to Haines, then driving with her family across Alaska and the Yukon all the way home to Homer because she couldn’t fly do a cancer treatment related lung problem, doesn’t want to die in a Seattle hospital now that she is in palliative care and the end is near. She wants to go Home. In the pictures she posts, she looks so happy to be on her way back home, and on one last epic ferry and road trip. I get it. And so this moment of everyday wonder in stocking feet and sipping good coffee and playing with blocks in the middle of a morning at the end of October suddenly seems very, very important. Life is tricky. Take the treats that come your way.
