I meant to write on Thursday.  I meant to bake two carrot cakes, and to sew my Halloween costume, and clean the house, and do two loads of laundry. But on the way home from Walmart (1 container liquid eyeliner, 3.5 yards fabric, 6 cheap earings, 4 rings and a stone bracelet, green eyeliner, nail polish, 1 dozen plastic snakes later), I looked up. 

And the glow from New York turned my mother's favorite color of red, and the sky began to dance.

And I couldn't do anything except try not to crash the car, and  get home in time to grab Ivan and run into the backyard, and stand with him under the undulating sky.  And it glowed and shimmied and rays of light burst through the night like sunlight on water appearing to a mermaid in a magenta sea, and then it disappeared.

G. called from Utah, later, and told me that it snowed on the roses there.  I told her the sky where I lived  glowed  like her silk scarf, as it floated from the ceiling to the floor the night we danced to turn our bad luck around. And we crossed our fingers and we thought of our separate signs and we hoped they meant what they said at last.

Standing in the backyard on a warm October night reminded me of a night spent watching the sky with Ivan just after we came back from Russia, when children were a possibility, an inevitablity, and a sense of purpose.  When I thought that just because Koschei was out of the closet and loose in the world, it didn't mean that he could find and trap me and drag me off. That was when I wrote:

Standing in the backyard with you, my love,

observing the lonely stars,

clenching the dewey grass with toes prehensile,

for one minute spinning on a silent world,

and then

somewhere among the flap of batwings,

the glide of geese on the river

the rolling tide of voices inundates the twilight

the summer supper noises

Boys being called to bed, pianos practicing, after-dinner clatter and clash

babble of babies, hiccups and giggles and wails-

They roll past us, past the garden,

and plunge into the water;

And we reel the 'scope 'round, in separate arcs,

looking for direction and a star to call our own.

9:57:12 PM