My fascination with quantum paradoxes popped up yesterday. I’d been mulling over two courses of action, ways in which my life would go one way or the other. One good, one bad, to me. An inflection point happened, I saw the path forward and as I did, I realized that tracing out and imagining my future was simply a way of holding alternate realities in my mind until the box was opened and the situation revealed.

There’s a cold wind blowing. My wind chimes have shifted from soft, melodious tinkling to an annoying cacophony. I had to disconnect the little swinging ringer causing all the noise. The quiet is beautiful. I'll put the ringer back down, when the wind dies, providing I remember. But maybe that’s for the best.

There was a time when I felt perpetually on. Sensitive to every twist and turn life was prepared to throw at me. If life was a roller coaster I knew better than to stiffen up and hold the sides. Better to relax and flow around the corners. Being tense in times of trouble bode ill for my chances of surviving the trouble. I tried to be like water, looking for the path of least resistance on my way to the sea. I relished the challenges.

There’s a chance of rain this weekend. So, yesterday I cleaned the front gutter. I climbed a ladder and used my battery-powered leaf blower. The job was fairly quick. The ground along the front of the house is fairly level. I could have fallen, but I took my time and measured every step. I used my nice extension ladder. There was a rhythm to the job. Set up. Blow. Leave the blower. Move the ladder. Do it again.

I’ve been poked and prodded twice in the last several months, checking my innards, first with an MRI and then with a fancy camera that detected a nuclear tracer. In both cases the subject of the investigation came back clean, which is a pretty good sign for the aging body of an old man. I’ll take it.

I think the universe likes balance. It sent us another cat to replace the one we lost. The newest one, much like the old one, eats and hangs out. No touching allowed. It mostly runs when I appear, although lately it has taken to simply moving a safe distance away and watching me talk to it. Yesterday it lay in the pasture grass across the fence while I sat on the back porch. I talked; it listened. Of course, there’s a high likelihood the new cat actually has a home, because outside cats are promiscuous eaters. So, I might be getting ahead of myself in calling it a replacement.

I had a thought. Last night, after dinner, we played a game based on Dominos. The name of the game and its rules are immaterial. At the end of a round, each player counts up the pips on the dominos still in their hand, and low score wins after nine rounds. Here’s the thought. What if, at the end of one round a player accidentally miscounted, because wine and drinks were flowing and the player’s head was not really in the game, but another player of better math skills saw it, and thought it was done on purpose.

Off to the east, as I stand on my porch, I can see the waning crescent moon, with Venus hanging just below it, in the dark morning sky. Some low clouds are passing by and the sky is just beginning to light as the planet turns us to face the sun. The little wren is still asleep in his cubbyhole on the porch pole.

I have a car and I am exhausted. Partly, there’s always the nagging suspicion I might have done the wrong thing. I suppose second guessing is just in my nature. Then there was the stress of simply buying the durn thing. It takes an emotional toll. Finally, there was the wrestling with insurance and dealing with the rent car that toted me around while I looked for a new vehicle. Lots of t’s to cross and i’s to dot.

As third acts go, I’m having fun, particularly on the music front. I played an open mic again last night, and it went reasonably well. I held my own. I was ignored by some, complimented by others, and actually had someone dancing. That’s always nice. Plus, some friends came along, and one of them played, too, and that made the evening even better, because I like my musical friends, comrades in arms.

I wish I could get a good shot of the little wren sleeping in the cranny of my cedar porch pole. But I think it will take more effort on my part. I’ve tried sneaking up, but apparently I’m not a good sneaker. I think I’ll need to set up my tripod with my old school SLR camera. Or, I could just let the little wren sleep and keep my mental picture. Either way I’m glad to have him and happy he feels comfortable.

Round, round, get around. I get around. Catchy song and a given in today’s society. But I learned a sharp lesson when I lost my wheels a couple of weeks ago. Getting around is hard when you’re solo. There’s ride sharing, but it costs a pretty penny. It appears my best option when I’m carless might be the Capital Area Rural Transportation System (Carts). At first glance it seems pretty robust, and I’m sure there will be a learning curve, but I think it might offer me a car alternative, a backup system. So, I’m off to investigate.

Happy Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day, take your pick. Either way, it’s a stretch to say Columbus discovered America, if by America you mean the land that became the United States. He discovered the Bahamas. Although from there the Spaniards got to us because we live on a hard-to-miss land mass. So, I guess it’s okay to give Columbus his due. In either case, the indigenous peoples were in for a hard time with the coming of Columbus.

I was sitting outside yesterday afternoon, in the shade of a deck roof with a big fan spinning. The air was soft with a hint of fall. Short days and cool nights have chased away the worst of the summer heat. There was music being made by a man of magic and we were all enthralled, having heard the songs many times before, but never tiring of the tunes.

My life has been upside down the last few weeks. It’s so unsettled I can't remember the date it started, only the moment a deer came out of the grass and my car knocked it into next week. The deer and my car both went to their final resting places. Losing a car is a bad deal for a single old guy living in the country. My insurance company gave me a rental, but you can’t walk to the corner grocery store and buy a car so the rental runs out before the new car will get here.

My brain is an untidy place. Unlike some, who can quote long passages from books or complete poems, I mostly remember the sense of the thing. I can never say, so and so, writing in such and such, said this, and then offer up the quote. Sometimes I can’t even remember who said something. The books I’ve read are just a list and the information in them, the stories and observations, are accreted to my brain in bits and pieces as though it were a patchwork quilt.

We drove through Hunt and Ingram on our way home Sunday. The power of water was on full display. The cliffs were washed clean, and only the biggest trees remained standing beside the river. The works of man were ravaged, too.  Cars beaten flat sat beside the road. Houses emptied or swept away dotted the landscape. The slate was wiped clean and it was difficult to see what stood where.

I am home from a camping trip that reminded me of camping trips of old. At several points there were seven children all under the age of eight, running through the camp, splashing in the river, and making joyful noise. The fourth generation. And we were light at least one family who is away in Virginia, with two more children. Of course, there were bumps and bruises and a tear or two, but it was the normal stuff of little learners, learning.

I was thinking yesterday about the imagination of our ancestors, those early humans who trod the landscape figuring things out as they went along, learning. They lived short, brutish lives but they found ways to make them longer, and safer. Of course they made mistakes along the way, and we’re still making mistakes, but we’re still learning.

I took a short walk yesterday in the early evening hours. The moon was well up, sitting high in the sky in its first quarter phase. It felt close as though I could reach out and touch it. The unlit half of the moon was clearly visible if you looked long enough, and I had the time. As I looked, I thought about all the people before me who had looked, especially our earliest ancestors, as they walked around making sense of the world.