Surprised by the calendar.

Saturday, November 1st, 2003

It always catches me napping, but hey presto, it’s November!

Seems as if it was just last night we were sitting on the steps of James and Rebecca’s lovely Avondale Estates home, watching a steady stream of kids make their way past the foamcore tombstones lit by colored lights and…hey wait, it was last night! I’m still burping the pizza! What’s all this about November, then?

Oh.

Sometimes the steady clunk of the days into the ‘completed’ bin of life just lulls me into a state of complacency, only to be startled by the arrival of yet another month’s worth of bills–didn’t I just pay those the other day when we were in Seattle? Oh, our west coast trip was how long ago? Amazing. This explains the leaves in the yard.

I think we get–okay, I get–a little disoriented by the travel. When we get the opportunity to have several tastes of fall–starting with a soupçon of leaf-color in Ontario, just north of Sault Saint Marie, and savored in the next course as we drove up the Keewenau Peninsula towards a small town called Agate Harbor–all of these small morsels set me up for the big “huh?” when autumn finally makes it down here to latitude 37, Positively Atlanta.

But it’s here, complete with leaves to be raked, and since we’ve dispensed with the birthdays and trick-or-treating that marks the tenth month, hey, why not the eleventh?

Here in town, it means we get to vote in a few days for a County Commissioner from a slate of candidates of whom none of which are flaw-free as far as I’m concerned. Sure, none of them are an action movie star either, but that’s small consolation.

And it also means (it seems) that more folks are calling to have fine graphic design work done at reasonable prices, so I suppose it’s a good thing that the new G5 is humming along beautifully, flawlessly, aluminum-y.

But i just wasn’t quite ready for the view of Miner’s Castle when Sammy flipped the calendar on the refrigerator (yes, twelve months of the Upper Peninsula, courtesy of Sam’s parents.) November it is, then.