pull up a chair

for days, all of us who tiptoe in my chunk of the american puzzle piece were wrapped in the molasses-tinged, Egyptian-cotton bath towel that is a 10-day string of cloud-free, sun-drenched october weather.

and did i mention it was regularly hovering in the gets-no-better 70s?

it seemed, if you were practiced in the high art of denial, as if it might go on forever.

but then the weatherpeople cleared their throats, uttered their pronouncements, and we all saw up around the bend: cold and rain and gray upon gray.

the days were numbered. the sun’s last bone-warming sunbeams, they were numbered too. 3-2-….

and when it got to one, the last few hours between indian summer and lots of socks and sweaters, i made sure i licked up every last drop.

i hauled my barefoot self right out the screen door, one last time. i carried my humble plate of clementines and toast out to where my garden path gives way to meditation.

i sat upon the bench. i watched the sun spots dance along my knees. i listened to the rustle of the nodding heads all around me, the alliums and ferns. i startled when a squirrel with crabapple bulging from his cheek scampered just above my shoulder, along the fence-top highway that carried him from limb to larder.

i sat there as long as conscience would allow. it was a workday, after all, and there were calls to make, sentences to cobble.

it is a not-so-common thing, a lung-filling exception to the rules of life, to know, in the moment, that you are savoring the last droplets of one delicious drink, whatever drink might have been poured into your goblet.

we spend much of our lives looking back, wishing we had known that something sweet would be no more.

that we wouldn’t always have a papa there to call. that that one last saturday, when we sat beside his bed in the hospital, that that would have been the last. that no more words would have come between our lips.

that our babies wouldn’t always be. that one day they’d up and run, and that old papoose would get dusty in the corner. that the storybooks on the shelf wouldn’t flop open to the most-loved page, the double spread of mike mulligan’s steam shovel, the one we once memorized, every line and scratch of pencil.

more often than not, we have no warning from the weatherman — nor, from the voice that narrates our life story: soak it up, it’s ending at the sunset.

but this week i had that peek around the bend. and with my coffee and my clementine, i soaked up every drop. to get me through till march or april, when the sunshine calls me back. and lets me out without my shoes.

what was your last gasp this week? are you, like the chipmunks and the squirrels, storing up for winter?