Episodic

Minnesota Public Radio, last year, interviewed a beloved, retiring weatherman and asked him what the overarching pattern of Minnesota weather was. He told them, "There is no pattern. It's episodic."

This time of year, with the cool mornings and the blankets on the bed and the honking Canada geese, it's episodic too. You gain just enough introspection this time of year to be open to all kinds of things. You are, as my friend Rosina says, "ready to receive."

My old girl cat, Motorboat, was a stray teen-kitten who limped across my frosty front yard, in just this kind of weather, just this time of year. I went out and threw my afghan over her, took her in, fed her, and let her sleep in my lap for four hours. Then I took her over to the young neighbors across the street, who had just lost their cat. The husband took her, walked through his house, opened the back door, and threw the cat back outdoors.

That little cat had the good fortune to limp back through my front yard the next morning. She let me throw the wool afghan over her again, and take her in, and feed her, and she slept in my arms, in spite of being sick as a dog, and she never, ever stop purring. Sandy, the vet assistant, promptly named her Motorboat, for that purr. She's kept it up for 13 years now. We are little old ladies together now.

I left my dying marriage just about this time of year. I had found an apartment and put it on hold for two months. Just knowing I had someplace calm to go sleep if I had to was a tremendous relief. Then the big yuppie department store downtown, Schmulekov's, put mattresses on sale for 99 dollars. I went down and bought a mattress and had it set up on a metal Hollywood bed frame in the new apartment. When Motorboat and Buster Cat and I finally left, we slept on that bed. And the weather broke into bright, deep fall sunshine days. Day after day. It was just incredible how good the weather was that fall.

My friend Diane left her husband just at the start of the Christmas season, just about this time of year . Her husband had taken her and her daughter out to the Christmas tree farm for the tenth year in a row, and was, for the tenth year in a row, too drunk to tie the tree to the top of their car in any functional way. And, for the tenth year in a row, the tree fell off the car and onto the freeway on the way home.

Diane found a little apartment up over the movie theater, in her little town in Virginia. She found out her first night there that the landlord had forgotten to tell her that the heat had been turned off. She was so cold that she kept waking up from the shivering. She could smell the popcorn from the movies downstairs. And she could not stop smiling.

Sometimes you just got to step forward, into the arms of the future. You don't get blueprint approval, but it gets better the farther out you go. I found my way to a furniture store across the street from my workplace and the salesman showed me a wonderful thing called a Lady Lane Recliner. I got a little TV that I could lift and move around by myself. The judge ordered my soon-to-be ex-husband to give me my furniture, on board a moving truck, in clean and good condition. I watched the Slumberland sales and got my chest of drawers and a much better mattress. Me and my back love that upscale mattress with a great and abiding love.

Diane found a house, a wonderful house. And a wonderful, dreamy-handsome new boyfriend, who, stone-cold-sober, tied the Christmas tree to the top of the car and it DID NOT fall off.

I've always liked fall. When I was kid, it meant my birthday was coming. I like it when the sweaters all come out. I like warm tea and cats who want to cuddle. I like crisp, cool mornings when anything is possible, episodically. Helen Keller said, "Life is either a great adventure, or it is nothing at all."

Peace,

Janelle