It’s no secret that I am no pumpkin spice girl; fall for me means the light shifts and I just want to crawl into a hole until February when the light shifts again. I tend to ruminate anyway, but fall drives my thinking into overdrive. And just like clockwork come my weird dreams, like the one the other night where I dreamed there were dead bluejays all over our back deck because the cats had gone on some sort of killing spree. (In truth, we found a small dead rabbit on the front lawn last week, which we immediately pinned on our big orange male cat Duffy but was probably the small scrappy black-and-white Ghostie Girl.) I’m not a woo-woo sort of person but I was disturbed enough to Google “what does dreaming about dead bluejays mean” and as usual got all sorts of possible answers, none of which seemed to fit.

And then I thought, I probably should skip the psychic and go straight to an exorcist.

It’s turning colder at night already, and even the cats are cozying up rather than stalking the doors wanting to be let out. The girls are back in school and no one, least of all me, has gotten the hang of the schedule. D started piano lessons and I bought her a nice keyboard, but it’s caused this cascade of projects around the house because in order to set the keyboard up we have to rearrange the playroom, which means rearranging the girls’ bedroom, which means all the stuff they have dragged up from the basement needs to either go back to the basement or disposed of. Also, I have spent the last month wanting to drag my guitar out of the closet but it’s still there, probably needing new strings, but that’s a task that always makes me sad because my dad always changed my strings. And even though he showed me how to do it, I don’t want to.

I can’t believe it’s been ten years since he died (well, in a few weeks it will be ten years). I’m thinking about him while listening to John Denver and James Taylor, much to the annoyance of the girls who have all of a sudden developed an affinity for K-pop. (I blame that Turning Red movie, which has been watched so many times at our house I can’t stand it anymore.) Sometimes I think it’s probably a good thing that Dad died before Trump’s presidencies, because he probably would have had several heart attacks by now over the state of things. There are times when I wonder what Dad would have said about something, but I know exactly what he would have said about the state of the world right now. I also know exactly what he would say about my car (clean it), my house (clean it), my kids (need discipline), our decision to even have kids and also how we wound up fostering (crazy). I don’t really miss his lectures, but I miss the sound of his voice over the phone, I miss eating chocolate ice cream on the couch and watching the Blues Brothers, and I miss his ability to fix pretty much everything, including once using a metal coat hanger and duct tape to hold my car’s muffler in place.

And, I wish. I wish he could know my kids, I wish they could have had him as an active presence in their lives and not just my memories. I wish he was here to help me clean out the basement or fix the crack in the wall above my closet door. I wish he was here, period.