Working a puzzle of the great city of Philadelphia two nights ago. It’s that time of year! Though we are delinquents who failed to keep in touch, the happy memory of puzzling with our Portland friends, Dan and Kristin, is as bright and clear as yesterday: the four of us huddled over one or the other of our dining room tables, sipping something boozy, the hi-fi whirring and punctuated by the sound of laughter and voices chatting merrily about every little thing.

It has been a wonderful few days, my melancholy about the state of the world tamped by the beauty of those nearest to me. I enjoyed a long stretch in the kitchen, making soup and my annual batch of fudge, roasting vegetables, and baking cookies for neighbors and my first ever exchange. The swap was at my friend Kelly’s, and it was a grand time, a room full of kind and generous women of all ages, each of us merry in our own way, feasting on sweet and savory treats, and glad to be together.

I have been helping clean out my neighbor’s house over the past few months, eighty plus years of trinkets, treasures, and trash. Though everyone laughs with incredulity when I say it, I rather enjoy it, the searching, the organizing, the discovering, and find myriad ways, both intentional and unexpected, to make it fun. It mostly involves me being silly and laughing loudly at the great company of my dear friend Peggy, one of the finest and most delightful women I have ever had the pleasure to know. We stumble upon treasures that remind us of our childhoods, our mothers, grandmothers, and friends. We find the weird, the wacky, the sad. It is all good.

And the weather! Eeek. Dare I say how nice it has been here? Crisp and bracing, with many sunny sky days and starry nights (I think we saw the space station whizzing above last night!), a little rain here, a little rain there, and overall quite nice. My Portland friends have been inundated with a flood of rain, all safe and dry last I heard. My Colorado friends snow came and quickly went, as it tends to do. Hoping our other weather shoe doesn’t drop with a menace but a wee tremble instead, a slow hush of giant flakes. I wouldn’t mind that at all.