Leaves Are in the Air

Sometime in early September you have to start watching where you're walking, or you can end up with one of these in your hair.

My pal, Virginia, swatted me on the back the other day while we were ambling and gabbing.

"Spider?"

"Yup," she said. "I wanted to squeal but I didn't want to scare you."

"Yeah, I probably would have jumped a mile high," I said, contorting my hand around my back to make sure she had really gotten it. Maybe it was crawling under my shirt. Ugh. Think Charlotte so as not to lose it. Good spider.

Along with fat spiders come the Day of the Dead,  angled sunlight,

apples,
pumpkins, and transitional weather.














Soon it will be cooler. A view from my office window gives a sneak preview.

And cooler weather  allows favorite clothes: sweaters, boots, and scarves, all of which are a great friend to women of a certain age, whose necks may be getting crepier by the nanosecond. I am not posting a picture here.

Sometimes I look at the skin on my neck and I wonder what on earth happened. But I think Nora Ephron already wrote about that, and she did it really well. Recently I went to the dermatologist and she actually said, "it's a good thing your face doesn't look like your forearms." I think she was trying to give me a compliment, but if my face looked like my forearms, we would be in the middle of an unspeakable horror movie.

Back to the wardrobe. This weekend I'll pull out and polish my boots, including a pair of old Dehners, made for me when I was an enthusiastic teenaged horseback rider. Money to pay for them came from mucking stalls during horse shows. Twenty-five dollars a day minus expenses, which included my share of the room at Motel 6.

Remarkably those boots used to slip on -- well, maybe not "slip on," but they would end up on my legs after a great deal of pulling and tugging. Getting them off was a two-person vaudeville act, and amazingly not one bone was broken in the process.

In the late 80s I had a cobbler install zippers so I could wear those boots with an army green pleated wool gabardine maxi skirt. There was a snarky administrative secretary named Sandy, who commented that they were "quite a statement."  I didn't care what Sandy thought, since she used enough hairspray to singlehandedly puncture the ozone layer. In retrospect maybe I did care a little, since I can still remember her comment all these years later.

And then last year I took them to the Kensington shoe guy for a once over, and he topped his know-it-all self by arguing that "those boots could never have been used for riding -- the zippers would have been against the saddle." I said, "I know, I had the zippers installed." And then I took my boots off the counter, headed out the door, and said,"I'll find somewhere else to take them, thank you very much."

If you're familiar with the Kensington cobbler, you understand that there is just so much one can put up with before he isn't amusing any more.