Best Not to Ask

...where we've been the past month. Where we are now is battered after Hurricane Wilma. The South Florida landscape is fairly decimated, but that doesn't start to match the devastation in our heads. The common, desperate question "How'd you do?" is met with that blank stare, that shrug of shoulders "Oh, my house came through ok." What it means is, we are totally numb and in shock and all the electricity in the world coming back to our houses will not fix this.

It's like decades ago in the insane asylums, rocking back and forth over the puzzle board, just put these pieces in one at a time and you can put yourself together again.

But for me, this week, it's quilting. Sewing 441 2-inch squares together by hand. To make a quilt I cut out 13 years ago. Surely by the time these pieces come together I will have pieced my mind back together. These are the deals we make as we sew.

We actually ran away for Halloween tonight. Trick-or-treating was just about banned, given the power outages and the mountains of debris in the narrow streets. We were too exhausted to buy candy (hmmm maybe we could have given away all our emergency cracker pacs). So we got in the car and went out to dinner and missed the sweetest block party of the year. I never knew you could skip Halloween. It feels tragically curmudgeonly.

If tomorrow is really November maybe we get to start fresh and clean as if October never happened.