So it is here – frost, the kind you have to scape off your windshield if you have not garaged it. Summer and I discovered it this morning and while I got the defroster going, she ran for a scraper. She couldn’t find one, so she improvised. Soon we were looking at each other through a little cleared spot in the windshield. Tomorrow I will go out early to start the car. I hope I remember.

I didn’t have frost on the pumpkin because I have not yet carved one. Perhaps on the day of Halloween I will buy discounted ones and make a pumpkin totem pole. No, I did that when I was a teenager and it was more work than than I had anticipated. Those were the days, though, when I would just push on through a project until it was completed. I don’t like to do that anymore. Once I built a Christmas fantasy castle out of tiny marshmellows and little candies; Mother and I have been looking for the pattern of it for years and can’t find it. (We think some mice in the attic ate the original.) I enjoyed making that castle, on the big oak table that was my grandfather’s in the room of the house where the morris chair sits – the chair in which they lay my mother on the day she was born.

There was the smell of the house in the air – woodsmoke and sun-dried quilts.