48. A Good Day

The days are definitely getting shorter—and colder. We’ve had soft freezes a few nights; next week temperatures are due to drop to the mid-20s. Serious fall, but it’s October, and bright sunny days sometimes wake after those cold nights.

Friday was like that, with afternoon temperatures all the way to the mid-60s. Enough reason, some thought, to have a late afternoon-early evening gathering in my font yard. I called and texted, and said I’d light a fire, order up a pizza, and see what people could conjure out of their kitchens. 

A dozen of us spread—not huddled—around a fine small fire, distanced and unmasked, taking advantage of our great outdoors. We put the pizza, beer and wine, a cake, quiche, chips and an assortment of plums and apples on a table and took our turns feeding and drinking, moving chairs to make small conversations with one group and then another.

The talk was of hikes, ski-times, places we like in the Wallowas, people we like who weren’t here—some gone all together. Horace Axtell, the Nez Perce elder most of us had seen and heard often enough to bring a smile at the mention of his name and his stories, is gone. We noted that. Our sculptor had sold a piece and someone brought me a birthday fabric hanging. 

I’d had a birthday earlier in the week, when the weather was snotty—so this was one excuse for the Friday gathering. But mostly it was friends jumping on a fine October day to see each other—and maybe forget about the disease and politics that has dogged us for months. 

We hadn’t counted on the sunset, but the streaks of red wove in and through clouds across most of the coming night sky. That took up some conversation, and an I-Phone image of it the next day confirmed its brilliance.

These one-minute-on-the-pandemic musings let me let off steam and get my insightful insights out to friends. But they’re also becoming a kind of diary, and somewhere out there, when this pandemic and all the strange accompanying aberrations of whatever normal behaviors were seven months ago are forgotten—or have become permanent, they’ll be reminders of my life journey as it slides into its 79th year.

I wanted Friday in that memory book.

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