Chapters

Life has been so . . . strange . . . lately, and so all-at-once, that it's been a little tricky to find precise markers. It's not that there haven't been any. It's that there have been so many, they're hard to unravel. Sometime, say, ten years from now, someone will say, "Do you remember the fall of 2008?"

And I'll say, "Oh, you mean that time when the cat showed up in the car that the Family-of-Six was driving when they came to stay in my house and I had just gotten a new job and had just about had it with my old one and the Milk Guy and I were complicated and I started seeing a counselor and I got diagnosed with cancer? That fall?"

It's like one of those letters that people used to write in the "Olden Days" when they didn't have much paper so they wrote about four sheets' worth on one page, all on top of each other, going all in different directions. If I knew how to search such a thing on the internet, I would, so you could see what I'm talking about.

I don't know how people could read those kinds of letters, but I guess they could, and when they did, they would know when they had gotten to the "bottom" of the page in one direction and which way to turn it to read the next bit, but I don't suppose it was easy. In another sort of messy, confusing way, there have been definite beginnings to all of the different things that have happened this fall, and some of the chapters are ending now, too.

For example, the cat moved away down the street a few months ago. Now the Sixes are going, too, although they're moving around the world instead. I still find something almost surreal about how it happened that I had a place for them all to stay and they had the time to stay here during this first and scariest part of my illness and how we became better friends than we had known we were to begin with .

I'm going to miss them . . .