Halloween. Chester’s Gotcha Day. I took the day off to celebrate the latter. I detest Halloween. But I do enjoy seeing the fun costumes. And I ain’t gonna turn down a Reese’s Cup, pumpkin or bats or standard shape, I have no preference. So we’ve had the bacon and fried taters, he’s opened his four presents, representing one for each of his years here (although I’m sure he would have preferred the number in dog years equivalent), we’ve been to Chickalay for the requisite fluff cup and nuggets, and have napped in between all activities. Although it was over 80 degrees today, the breeze is cool, more so because I’m in the shade. But I’m watching the chickens wade through the fallen leaves from my formerly showy sugar maple. They’re all so unique in color and patterns. I find their gentle clucking therapeutic. I was never permitted to have chickens, I don’t remember the reasoning. Prolly ‘cause I’d cry myself dehydrated when the hawk made a meal of one of them. And in my family, we revere hawks and other wildlife above domesticated animals. ‘Cept groundhogs. They never were tolerated. It was the holes they dug, they’d hobble a horse or kill a cow. There’s a ball game tonight. There’s a ball game most nights. I don’t mind the noise, people are having fun and united, politics hopefully a long way from their thoughts…

Friends, Americans, Countrymen, lend me your eyes. Thanks to all the loyal readers and friends who have reached out to me in the last several months, checking to make sure everything was okay. It wasn’t, but it was. Nothing to alarm anybody about. Some of my undoing was my own doing, some of it wasn’t. It was a trifecta of loss, two friends and a leg injury got me down just as spring was cranking to full throttle. As I said on this day in 2021, life will kick you in the teeth time and time again but I just picture myself crawling to my knees, bloodied and disheveled, motioning for more, and grinning madly.Because weakness is fear. And I ain’t skeert. You ever win one of those goldfish at the fair? Like, when you weren’t even trying to win a goldfish, you were going for bragging rights against an old high school nemesis, or maybe the carnies offered some grand cash prize. But carnivals are twisted, and you have not a snowflake’s chance in the Sahara of winning what you really want. And you’re presented this sad little goldfish in its tiny plastic bag. If you’re unlucky, and the goldfish has a supernatural will to survive, it makes it through the jostling of the carnival, staring out and swimming madly but going nowhere, until you make it home and dump it in an old vase filled with chlorinated water…