My Wobbly Bicycle, 158

        Is this heaven? The sidewalks are paved with gold. And the trees. Even as the colors mute, they’re still all these shades of softening brown. You wouldn’t think about politics if you didn’t have to.  I usually post on Wednesdays, because supposedly that’s the day the most readers will read it, but election day is Tuesday. You going to read about leaves after that?So this is what’s happening before. What’s happening is that an almost transparent spider is letting itself down my venetian blind by its almost invisible thread. It’s trusting the thread will hold. It has done this so many times before, and the thread has held. Its body has been reliable in that way, even without incantations or yard signs. The spider will continue, when we’re not looking, into the industry of its day.After it’s gone from my sight, morning will pass through the space where it was and the golden trees outside will pick up from there. Even the already bare ones will be drawing in their sap for safekeeping. Things are simple at heart. Maybe I can stare out absentmindedly for a few minutes and cause no harm from negligence. The leaves on the ground are keeping a world of creatures warm, and my spider knows how to signal the rest that there’s nothing to fear, here, from this woman who’s only interested in making clicking noises with her fingers, kind of like a cricket.I’ve already voted. The die is cast in more ways than one. I suspect all the screaming into the void grows less and less effective. Those people who haven’t yet “made up their minds” are either passive-aggressive and enjoy the attention of being “undecided,” or they’re living in a tree house of their minds, waiting for the next breeze to blow them one way or the other.       When I’m scared, when I’m depressed, I’ve learned that it helps a lot to hang onto tangible things. To appreciate dinner with friends and spiders that are as intricately made as my great grandmother’s tatting. Tatting is just a series of tiny knots and loops that end up being both beautiful and strong. You can go on with that metaphor yourself, if you’re inclined.       Yesterday I walked to the post office to mail my son a birthday present. (I walked a total of four miles yesterday, a record since my meniscus surgery.) I headed down Sixth Street, with the big old Victorian houses and old trees blindingly bright in the sun. That part of town is famous for its Halloween decorations, that were being set up as I walked by. Spiders, webs, ghosts, a purple dragon, dead people, tombstones. Literally thousands of kids Trick-or-Treat in that safe and generous neighborhood. There are monsters out there, truly, but these are the fake ones. These are the ones we all laugh at, to help us be brave when the real ones show up.