It’s October. Voting for the midterms has begun. The clock is ticking. Midmorning. We are governed by a treasonous madman. It’s October, 2026. A lawnmower makes its rounds a few blocks off. I am tired. You probably are too. The stakes could not be higher, they say and they mean it and they are right. November is around the corner, the darkest months coming. It’s the second hand moving that’s making that tick tick tick. I can’t hear the leaves rattling in the wind, but I can see their fluttering shadows on the white clapboards of my neighbor’s two-story annex. Jays are noisy. They always sound insistent, like they’re demanding that all the other birds move over, but they might just be hollering out, Here I am and aren’t I grand? Toast for breakfast. A lawnmower drone. The dog sits at my feet. He is quiet. He is waiting for someone to put on their walking shoes and then he’ll make a racket. The tree truck winds up and then grinds. Makes screeching blue jays seem melodious by comparison. What do you hear at night when the house has gone quiet? Not my wishes, my sorrows – those are silent. Not his movements stirring in sleep – he has gone silent. For Halloween, I want a sparkly orange pumpkin light, like my neighbor around the corner. Not the usual skeletons, thank you very much. No, a twinkling pumpkin that grins, but not in a creepy way. Have you lost your way? I wanna believe you’re home. You found your way home. Not the bricks and mortar shelter, but the eternal expanse. Meanwhile, I’ll be considering what to make for dinner and wondering where I left the grey-handled scissors. Life goes on, they say, and it does. Vote like your life depends on it, and it does. The hydrangea blooms that remain are ballet pink – the color of slippers and leotards. Now the truck beeps in reverse. You’ll notice the absence of a curse. I can be restrained, you know — or you might not know, actually. The mowers are silent but the beeps get closer. The jay must’ve left to find her buddies. They don’t tend to be solitary, always yakking those big blue bruisers. And see? Bruisers — is that fair? The dog moves, sits, and sighs. I will move, sit, and sigh later. An afternoon coming of stitching, deleting Democratic texts begging for money, and then watching the ABC Murders, even though I can’t stand Malkovich’s weird and labored accent. But no snacks of chocolate or ice cream today! Gut pain last night. No thank you. The tree guys are gone. The shadows still waggle. The black walnuts fall in violent repetition. The clock! Oh, my Lord! The clock! Twenty minutes gone. A dull buzz of a notification by my side – Talarico this time. A jet passes overhead. I wish I could hear my heart beating. I wish I could hear his heart beating. Chainsaw? Whiny, intermittent — so not gone then, the tree guys, but my younger son, he is gone. Gone. A delivery van, the first of many, rumbles by, stops — its door clunks open, slides shut. Yesterday for me it was supplements and a sewing pattern. I’ve already determined I may not be able to figure the pattern out. It says to use the “template pressing method?” What the fuck is that? And there it is. The F bomb. Not for a treasonous, pathological president. Not for chainsaws ripping into the peace of morning. Not for the unbearable silence of his absence. But for a pattern that I paid good money for offering up incomprehensible instructions. Fold half an inch, then 5/8 of an inch, then stay stitch. What happened to sew front to back using a 5/8 inch seam? I’d like to hear what the yellowing blades of the lily-of-the-valley have to say. Would they quote Mary Oliver? Or would they curse the blue jays for shitting on them? Would they warn, snow is coming! The dark is coming! Vote like your life depends on it because it does. Before Saturday’s freeze, we will bring in the remaining plants. One person in this house loves the green invasion and one does not. Have you ever been attacked by an aloe — an aloe that looks like an alien being, no less? Never mind. Winter is coming. The clock says so. The light on yellow leaves says so. I don’t think I’m ready.

Written to a prompt, 10/15/26

Back in March, I auditioned pathways and trees, using sheer fabrics recently purchased at a Longmont Goodwill. There are chunks of a blue and white former skirt as well.

I thought I was settled on a bright green moon (silk from a former blouse) until I got some input. I decided to follow both Deb and Joann’s ideas: muted the green; added some bright blue. It’s better I think.

I also added a trunk to the tree on the right.

The strip of felt-backed huts is quite old. Because of bulging, it required lots of additional quilting and because of all the layers, I frequently used the machine.

To me, this is a desolate landscape from which there is no escape, no warm shelter. The hut in the front is possibly hospitable, but it is isolated, unconnected.

I call this one, “Land of the Dead.”

Two friends of Danny’s got married yesterday. The three of them were roommates for many years. Close friends, in other words. I wondered: would they feel his presence in any way? I wondered what it would’ve been like for Danny to attend (still heartbroken, with Ella there). I wondered what thoughtful, generous gift he might’ve have gotten them, because he was amazing that way.

I also put it out there that I’d love to hear from Danny here, though in Newton it is mostly business as usual. Grief central. Fall activities. A No Kings Protest.

So he showed up. Twice.

First, it was the puzzle piece. Danny has appeared in puzzle pieces before (here and here), so when we finished this month’s puzzle and a piece was missing, I wondered — will he show up? I was prepared to be disappointed.

The nearly complete puzzle sat out for days. I vacuumed the rug underneath the table at least three times, each time scrutinizing the surface for that lone remaining piece and not finding it.

Then yesterday, there it was. Blue side up. Not six inches from the edge of the rug. Plain as day. Huh?

Hello, Dan!

Even if I didn’t subscribe to supernatural influences, I’d be hard pressed to explain how that piece got there. Stuck to the underside of the table and later fell? Stuck to the bottom of a shoe and somehow ended up there? No and no.

Then, early in last evening’s walk, we saw either a young hawk or a falcon directly overhead and quite near. This is unusual. Normally we see them around the corner and up the hill, not here near the house.

Moments ago that raptor flew right into the living room window — not ten feet from where I’m sitting. That has never happened before. Other birds, yes. A hawk? Absolutely not.

Oh my. Dan?

In other news, poor Finn had an anxiety attack in the middle of the night when yet another smoke alarm started chirping its low-battery signal. Chirp. Chirp. Oh, how it frightens him! Typically he pants hard and endures whole body shakes for at least an hour after the noise stops. And it always takes a minute to figure out which device is going off. Fortunately, Ken takes care of removing the battery, otherwise you’d have me swinging at the ceiling with a broom, cursing.

Last night we gave Finn a trazadone. It helped. I might’ve said, I’d rather the house burned down than put him through that again.

Poor guy.

The Newton Center protest wasn’t huge, though it was bigger than usual. What was notable was all the honking. So much honking!

We lost Danny seven months ago today.

This is one of the quilts I was working on as I sat in the rental space in Colorado, where every time Danny drove off, I’d wonder if I’d ever see him again. I couldn’t look at the cloth for months. Somehow, now I can. The dirty and chaotic feel of it captures some of the awfulness of those days in Longmont.

Deb thought I should rethink the green moon so I covered it with some organza. What do you think? An improvement is my feeling.

Here’s a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. I get one every day now by email.

A fist. In it, stale air and a broken, cheap ring.

Here the treasure is letting go, fingers unfurling and letting the crap metal hit the floor.

I thought I was better than this.

How could I prize such junk and hold onto it so tightly? Grievance. Tallies of let downs. Replays of injurious conversations.  

Rather than squeezing my scoreboard in some imaginary race to virtue, I’d like to kneel beside a fast-moving mountain stream and drop my miseries in. I’d watch them be hurled away downstream before the plop of their landing even reached my ears.

I wonder how my heart would feel were such unloading habit. I mean the literal heart – the muscle which flutters now and then but mostly reliably pumps under my clavicle, sending oxygenated blood to the body and the brain. The anatomical heart, which by the way, is also broken.

I might weigh less, unburdened by the X’s and O’s of tired comeuppance and lectures from some perch of imagined superiority.

I could see it going two ways.

In one scene, I dump the burden and then leap up, aglow with freedom — the freedom to love, the freedom to imagine otherwise, the freedom to remember glad scenes.

In the other version, I tip from my squatting position headfirst into the rushing waters and surrender — a final ablution and why not?

Which is not to say I am nothing without my scabs and scars and still oozing wounds, but rather that once those patches and gashes of pain are rendered inanimate, maybe I could let go even more. 

I keep writing things that sound like I want to die and maybe I do, actually, but I am not suicidal. To the worrywarts in my circle, please note this critical difference.

Do I hear from my dead son?

Is that him in this feather or that owl hooting across the midnight hour? Do all these people claiming authority really know about life after death or do they just allow their wanting and their longing to get comfortable – here desperate ones, have a cup of coffee and a pillow and go ahead and speak as if you know something.

He still loves you, they say. He is constantly near, they say. Talk to him, they insist, he’s listening.

But what if silence is silence and silence is stripped of meaning, any and all autobiography and biography wiped away, and can be leant into hard but not for comfort and certainly not with any expectation of a voice rising up out of it and easing my devastation.

What if silence is his final gift?

My ears are ringing these days. Ring! Ring! Probably too much sugar or vinegar or coffee or who knows what. Early, midday, late, this slight rushing in the head makes me feel as if I traverse a long, long tunnel inhabited only by my fearful body and a malignant wind.

Makes silence feel like a pretty good gift, actually.

Can I plug my ears and hold my nose and go underwater somewhere and let the undead haggle over my soul and be born again? 

Not in that way, but in some way — where the only anointing would be done with silence?

The silence he created by leaving. The silence crafted by his departure. The silence he left me with.

Written to a prompt on 10/13/26