The voodoo museum was small and dim and softly creepy, a rougarou propped up between a jumbled pile of crosses and a dusty case filled with potential fillings for a gris-gris. I don't not believe in voodoo, so I left an offering to Papa Legba by the door, in case he felt like opening up communication with anyone else. So hopefully something was paying attention when I wrapped an offering in a wish and knocked nine times on the wishing stump. I can use all the help I can get.

In the graveyard I left behind my tooth-shaped rock and wandered dizzily through the tombs, wondering at all of the monuments that have lost their names. Nothing is sadder than an unmarked grave.

And then there are the other parts, sitting in a bar in the middle of the night barely needing a cardigan, sipping drinks while the sound of a tuba wafts through the open door from somewhere. Battling a stiff wind in search of doors that ended up locked, sharing a taxicab with friendly strangers, fantasizing about a new life filled with cast iron and blues and gumbo, the same old gulf smells mixed with new ones.

I have trouble teasing it all apart. Smoothing a slip over thighs encased in tights and the lost vistas of the Terra Nova expedition. A hopeful rumor that steadfastly refuses to resolve itself and a treacherous journey down an iced staircase late in a smoky frozen night. Wandering alone for miles, spirals of metal strapped to my feet, watching the chill glimmer open up as far ahead as I can see even though the sidewalk under my feet is covered with something the soft gritty consistency of the sand I knew growing up on beaches. The feeling of snow on my fingers, shockingly cold, because snow in my head is still the neutral confetti of my childhood malls.

I am sure of less and less the longer time goes on, but a thing I do know for sure is that I am terribly thankful about how even though in some ways my family keeps getting sadly smaller, in other ways only grows larger and larger. How in this life we need never lack for love, and friends, for ill-conceived shenanigans and general hilarity.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends! Enjoy your turkeys and turkey substitutes.

It's lucky that I live in walking distance of my office, because the commutes were hopelessly snarled last night. The wind kicked up snow to scour my face and nearly knocked me off my feet, but that's nothing compared to trapped for hours in cars and buses, abandoning them and walking home.

A friend got snowed in with me, and this morning we bundled up and took a walk around the neighborhood, marveling at the truck on its side down the street and all of the cars abandoned all strewn across the hills. It's still too cold for anything to melt, but the remnants of my garden are wilting. And in the meantime, the city glitters everywhere, looking covered in the fake snow I remember from growing up in Florida.

Tomorrow, I am heading to New Orleans, where it is currently 80 and sunny.

Hearts don't really understand hiatus, is the thing, stretching to include whatever they come up again, like the tree that snatched up the antlers of a deer and grew tall, making branches out of what previously belonged to the ground. The way we move so quickly through space, all fire and heat, just means that we bump up against more and more and faster. Leaving and taking, until we're maybe not even made up anymore of what we started out with.

Sometimes during a pause in the crackle and whirl I can hear Chamfort just beneath my ribs, tired out with this world where the heart must either break or become hard as bronze. Like text sewn into the lining of a jacket, and only the person who put it there knows what it says.

In England they found spiderwebs from 140 million years ago, perfectly preserved in amber. The thinnest threads, somehow hardened and kept secret forever.

There are mornings--cool, misty mornings, when everything is hidden in fog--when I suspect that the only real way to know anything is to quit everything and devote myself to learning about lichen.

Lichen are maps for everything, everywhere--time and moisture and change and pollution. They grow on plants without eating them and on rocks where there's no soil and little air, and they can survive unprotected in space. Lichen thrive on mysteries. If we asked them to, lichen could probably tell us everything.

A while ago it was suggested that the rocks that rove in Death Valley each move for different reasons; that there are so many microclimates in that desert that no explanation is going to cover everything. As though there could even be an explanation for rocks that move as fast as people and yet haven't ever been observed budging an inch--which, in its own way, is very comforting. Still, maybe the lichen know why.

Yesterday I crouched on my balcony, clearing the debris from my garden to prepare the soil for winter sleeping, while a hummingbird sat on the top of the tree across from me and shouted at me for being too close to the feeder. I posed no threat to him, but there was no way he could have known that, and in the meantime there was the dry dirt on my hands and the spicy smell of pea vines and broken tomato branches. For just that time, everything went still enough that even the mysteries were at rest.

I have some questions about our perspective, in the way that we were looking for the caldera at Yellowstone only to learn that we couldn't see it because we were standing inside it, and the only way to know where it was turned out to be from above. How there's never a time when we're not in the forest, even if we can only see one tree at a time.

If the economics of our brains require that we're always finding a pattern, maybe the trick is to look for the patterns that come next. The ones that we notice first seem to lead us in the same circles, which is useful, certainly, but not valuable.

More to the point, I suppose, is that I've been thinking about the Cadillac in the Attic again, about saying yes to whatever comes up for the meaning and for the pleasure, and never mind interpreting the runes that my footsteps leave behind. Getting all Emma Bovary, the way that fits best in the fall.

Or I guess, in the way that the inside of my head is always poems even if I'm talking science, feeling like the inside of Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, which has somehow in the last few years become like an old friend. "During that summer--/Which may never have been at all;/But which has become more real" and "It was a summer of limitless bites/ Of hungers quickly felt /And quickly forgotten/With the next careless gorging."

"The bites are fewer now./ Each one is savored lingeringly, /Swallowed reluctantly."

I fell this morning on my way into the office, full length on the floor of the lobby. Since it's a school day I was carrying my bag of heavy books--being close to the same size as my bag has been getting me in trouble for pretty much my whole life--and I landed hardest on that side, on that hand and knee. My bag hit the ground and almost everything stayed inside, except from somewhere in the depths of the bag came a penny, which rolled out and landed, heads down, a few feet away.

I'm pretty sure gravity is out to get me.

This second anniversary of my granddad's death might have been even worst than the first one, if only because it's compounded by the additional loss of my grandma this year--the sure knowledge that in some ways my world is only going to get emptier and emptier.

Last Christmas, PZ Meyers wrote a thing that stuck with me, that I think about whenever I miss them, which is often:

One of the lies we always tell ourselves is that the pain will go away with time, that we'll get over it, that time heals all wounds, and it's not true. Every loss is forever raw, and we can feel it all again with just a thought or a reminder, like a Christmas phone call to the family. The older you get, the more of these moments of grief you accumulate, and they never leave you....Grief can grow, but so can joy. We can find delight and contentment in moments that balance the grief, without detracting from the honor we give the dead, and those moments also accumulate and never diminish in the happiness they bring to us. I can remember the good times I had with my dad, and the good times I've had with my children, and can look forward to a future of fulfilling cheerfulness with friends and family — this is how we cope. We embrace both the sorrow and the joy, letting neither reduce the other, and fill up our lives with everything. Hail and farewell, goodbye and greetings.

So it's the other things I'm looking at, the places that are filled with joy. Being an elephant and hanging out with Lloyd Dobler, the little guy dressed as a very serious chicken and joining us for his first brunch. (He was very much in favor of sucking on a spoon that had been used to stir coffee.) All of the fun holidays coming up, the promise of a winter filled with snow, carrying an umbrella with the solar system just above me. Sometimes, the only way out is through.

Truly, there is neither problem nor trouble, not in any real sense, but if there were it would likely be housed somewhere in our amyclaean silence, in our refusal to mention the holes in our defenses until it's almost too late. Maybe we should mention the arrival of the Spartans when we notice them lurking around our walls, instead of waiting until they've invited themselves over for dinner and pillaging. As an experiment.

We all already know that I'm incapable of even having a hand without showing it to everyone, but there's got to be a middle ground somewhere. Periander, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, concealed his burial spot through a remarkable trail of carnage, hiring two men to kill him and then four to kill those two, and then another bunch to find and kill those four. The plan worked, in that we still don't know where Periander was buried, but I'm just not sure that all of the mayhem and baroque planning is the way to go about getting anything done. If Periander hadn't been such a jerk his whole life, he probably could have just found a faithful friend or two that would divert a river over his grave and then take the secret to their own final resting places. Not to belabor my point.

Somewhere between Periander and putting all of my cards on billboards, I think. Figuring out the moral instead of writing out instructions. In all of that space in the middle there, there has to be a reasonable place to settle.

I think that we've probably taken our farming metaphors too far, that we've moved from sowing seeds to slaughtering lambs, and really our whole economy is wrapped up in vending those tiny lamb pieces even though we've convinced ourselves that our worth is just measured in wheat and cotton and soybeans. But if we planted ourselves in our fields, I don't think we'd be so fond of what we'd sprout.

But then there are things in the world like that salt mine in Poland, with a cathedral and statues and chandeliers carved out of salt. All of those miners down there over all of those years, coaxing shapes from the walls because it wasn't as though they were doing anything else. Just, you know, farming table salt for a few hundred years. All of this under our feet that the planet--the same one with the supervolcanoes and intraplate earthquakes--has arranged for. To keep us guessing, I suppose, in the way that everything that's already big just gets bigger until it turns out to be so small you could fit it in your pocket.

If, as I fear, my bones really are made of cement and the only roads that I won't sink into are the hard ones, then maybe I should plan a trip to the Valley of Flowers. You know? To sink into the soil someplace beautiful, plant myself somewhere hard to find. Become a statue, or a signpost, or a warning.

On Wednesday a lady walked up to me while I was waiting for a bus. She didn't look crazy, so you can imagine my surprise when she squinted at me for a couple of minutes and then, nodding, let me know that it's lucky I'm so thin, because otherwise the skirt I was wearing would make me look like a fat pregnant lady. Her civic duty apparently done, she kept walking down the block. The woman standing next to me caught my eye, and the only thing to do was laugh.

Morale around here has been low lately, and I notice that this is when my list of irrational fears is the loudest. All of the rational ones, too. Supervolcanoes and intraplate earthquakes and how the ground is basically waiting to explode and then swallow us up all the time, even when it seems like it shouldn't. After all, it isn't as though it hasn't all happened before. The planet is hostile, if more friendly that all of the alternatives.

It's the thinking around it that makes me so tired, to the clear spaces where gravity never fails but also doesn't hang quite so heavy on the shoulders.

Sometimes...sometimes I get distracted by the misdirection, rolling hearts between our fingers like marbles, absently, eyes elsewhere. Not even noticing all of the juggling we could be doing, if we knew how.

Sometimes the nights smell of lavender and jasmine and brine, of the undersides of newly fallen leaves, sweetly rotting moldy things and bourbon and fire. And maybe that's when the moon leans in close to watch, I can't be sure, but I'm pretty certain that even still the only thing left to do then is stand very still and wait. For whatever happens next, or doesn't.

So, I never learned my times tables. I've been faking it my whole life, and then recently a friend who is a teacher mentioned being appalled that her students didn't know their times tables, and it felt like the time to come clean. I still count everything on my fingers, or on little dots made next to the number I'm trying to multiply. I know most of the fives, and a bunch of the threes because of Schoolhouse Rock. (Well, mostly because of the Blind Melon cover, if I'm being perfectly honest.) The rest is just a total mystery.

The school I started at believed less in math and science and more in praying and coloring, and when I switched to a public school in the middle of second grade they were already on division. Since asking for help might just make me burst into flames--you never know--I didn't mention it to anyone. And then not knowing how to multiply just got to be embarrassing, so I continued to not mention it. Still, multiplying is a thing that comes up all the time, and I'm starting to think that my times tables might be a useful thing to learn. Memorizing them can't be more difficult than continuing to fake it for the rest of my life.

Just in case 10/10/10 actually is lucky, I'm glad that I spent part of it celebrating a wedding, all attractive people and funny speeches and happiness. I love weddings, and how there is a specific set of jokes that are only amusing at weddings, and watching families and friends all mixed up in one place and dancing.

Of course, after all of that is the part of leaving the wedding, alone in the unseasonably heavy rain with a pink umbrella and a black trench, because that part has to come some time. Anyway, it's more cinematic like that, all curls and contrast and a tiny girl on a wide empty street. And maybe that's its own kind of luck.

You'll have to forgive me, but I have been researching bat fungus kind of accidentally for something related to school, and so I have bats and fungus and their particular relationship on the brain. (There is no connection between getting an MPA and learning a lot about bat fungus, but somehow this is not stopping me. Not that that surprises anyone.)

Anyway, the thing about this fungus is that it's creeping all over all of these hibernating bats in North America, colonizing their wings and throwing off the balance of what keeps them alive during the winter. They won't necessarily even realize it, instead just getting colder and colder and not waking up. Similar bats in Europe get the same thing, but it doesn't kill them.

They think that maybe the bats in Europe have had it longer and learned how to survive around it. And now it is here, and these bats have to learn to do the same. Though how one is supposed to learn to survive something that happens during sleep is anyone's guess. I suppose it's mostly a matter of waiting.

Our merry band of reprobates did Orcas right, with the weather on our side and all of that scenery just begging to be looked at. On Saturday morning a deer walked right up to our porch like it was going to ask for a cup of sugar, which is the closest I have ever been to a deer. On Saturday night we sat around the fire with cabin tea warming our hands and Vacation Josh making everyone laugh until they cried. In between, we wandered through the woods to some waterfalls, played some ping pong, and I managed to successfully catch not even one fish off of the dock. (It took me until I got to the dock with my fishing pole to realize that I have never caught a fish in my life and would have no idea what to do if I did. I mean, aside from shriek and probably drop my fishing pole in the water.) There were at least two impromptu dance parties, a couple of rounds of Celebrity, chili, and mimosas. Although I have no basis for comparison, I'm pretty sure that Orcas is my favorite of the islands.

In some parts of the world, when a sunshower is happening, they say that there's a funfair in hell. Other places, it means that a witch is making butter or brushing her hair. Sometimes any number of different animals are getting married, or else the poor are, or perhaps a widow. The devil figures into it all pretty often as well. I find it interesting that an event that so often leads to a rainbow is mostly associated with something scary, how when given circumstances we can't explain our first instinct is to call it sinister. Perhaps that makes the eventual rainbow a more pleasant surprise.

I think sometimes about how shopworn these paths can get, how well-trampled even when covered with fresh leaves or baby ferns. How even the mantis shrimp must get tired sometimes of looking through its own complicated eyes in the same simple burrows.

I keep thinking that there are other lessons to learn from those crustaceans, something aside from seeing forward through time and mating for life. Something more about playing to our strengths, about ensuring that even if our strikes are less than direct our aftershocks will still communicate a point. About hiding in plain sight like that spider who looks like an ant carrying another ant.

Maybe the thing to learn from the mantis shrimp is somewhere in the sonoluminescence, in using sound in water to make light, creating a sinister impact to make our rainbows more pleasantly surprising. In the mantis it takes complicated instruments to notice their light, of course, but it takes five shrimp end to end to make one of me, so it could be slightly less complicated to make heat and light visible to the naked eye. If heat and light were the ultimate goal, no matter how they might dry the leaves and wilt the ferns.

Maybe our sunshowers aren't the worst thing about us.

In a couple of weeks I'm going to go speak to a high school class about, oh, any number of things, but partly about how I got to where I am now. (Public speaking scares me nearly to tears, which is obviously why I'm doing it: if I'm not going to let a little thing like gravity defeat me, why do I continue to let myself do it? I am in charge, here.) So I've been thinking about it a bit, off and on since I agreed to do it. How did I get here, in this cool misty town, surrounded by science and whiskey and laughing and adventure? It's kind of a hokey thing to consider, but then, it's not like I've ever been one to stop doing something just because it's unbelievably cheesy. (The answer, by the way, is probably sheer stubbornness. I'm not particularly talented or outgoing, but I am very stubborn.)

Being teenagers, of course, it's more than likely that they will be not so interested in my personal journey and much more interested in things like glowing tumors and why I'm still single, but it probably isn't the worst idea to consider how I got here in order to help decide where to go next.

As is my custom, I have been reading up about the equinox and its cousin the equilux. I don't mind the shorter days, the dark and the rain and the mystery. We don't care much about the moon anymore, just one more thing cluttering up our sky, but I find it terribly interesting how for just a bit yesterday, for one fixed point, every person on earth was having the same experience. Even if they didn't notice. We all started a new season together, however the hours of actual light and dark were split. There are too many geographical artifacts scattered around for that sort of thing to matter anyway.

Coincidentally I was also reading just recently about the transit of Venus in 1761, when science decided it would up and collaborate and observe the transit from all over the world in order to determine the exact value of the astronomical unit. (I have been reading this, which has been unexpectedly delightful, if confusing to the old man on the bus who asked what I was reading about that was so funny and received "astrophysics" as a reply. I'm always accidentally alienating people with enthusiasm and nerdiness.) Venus transits happen in pairs eight years apart every hundred something years, and the timing worked out so that there wasn't a single one during the whole of the 1900's.

In 1761 and then again in 1769 a whole mess of scientists took off for their expeditions regardless of weather and geopolitical disputes, and as is always the case came to a conclusion that was less than precise, but better than what came before. Eventually we invented technology that just plain went to space and measured what needed measuring, which is certainly efficient but lacks the romance of exploration. I much prefer to think of all of these people in their lonely outcrops, staring at the sky or straining through instruments in the hopes of learning something new.

Venus transits the sun, after all, and we know that looking at it too long or finding it too suddenly burns the inside of our eyes and photochemically dents them. All of those people staring at all of those skies maybe changed that day, physically, even if they didn't know it, eyes altered in the same way. Different, then, from all of the people who had never lived in a time of a transit, and from all of the people who did but never knew to look up.

My urban family doesn't stay put any better than I do, so next weekend we're going back to Orcas to count more animals and wear flannel and drink more cabin juice and maybe stage another dramatic reading or two of the guest book. (Cabin juice is an unlikely combination of hot tea, powdered cider mix, whiskey, and honey that manages to be delicious.) We all get the zugunruhe too, restless in our bones like birds and butterflies. I wouldn't mind returning to the islands every fall, all the cold water and tiny crabs. We've got all of this nature around, we might as well go and visit it sometimes. There are a lot of rocks out there that I haven't thrown into the water yet.