October is her holy month, as the sun subsides and the days thin toward Samhain.
Molly’s sister left on a November 1, years ago.
She never reads only one book at a time, prologue-to-afterword. Rather, the juggle of a novel with a volume of the natural history of a prairie county in Kansas, while scanning an expository of Pagan/Wiccan pre-Abrahamic influences and studying Jung’s collective unconscious mythology.
All this after a reliable daily news source, clearly a vice worthy of elimination.
She prefers two daily times to walk alone on the brick-paved alleys of the 1890 neighborhood near the statehouse.
When she dresses upon waking, pulls tights up her legs to resist the overnight chill, tucks her breasts beneath a cotton sweatshirt left behind by a former lover, under her oversized red-&-black plaid men’s lumberjack shirt, then the day’s exploration starts an hour after dawn. The clear blooming light brightens her mood with Hopper-esque levels of illumination that crawl down the russet brick walls of apartment houses near her own, from slate roof to limestone block foundation.
Other days, those that follow her nights of tears and fear, she conducts the lone alley tour with inward conversation as autumn’s breath pushes burnt sienna leaves downward to the pavers pocked with puddles under clouds before dusk.
This was not her plan, but she looks forward to tomorrow.
