So today is calling for snow - not fluries - snow, up to ten inches. The juncos reappeared this week, so I knew cold weather was on the way, but this is too much. And my worse nightmare, we have four people staying in the Bird's Nest. That means the driveway has to be cleared, the steps leading up have to be cleared, the deck has to be cleared. Not to mention, that they are predicting electrical outages, as the trees heavy with snow and weakened by Irene, come down. So that's what we have to look forward to - shoveling and no lights.

Daddy loved snow, mostly because he was a skier. But also as a deer hunter, he would say a light coating of snow during deer season (around Thanksgiving) would be good to track the deer and also, if a wounded deer is moving, to follow him. April snow he liked for spring skiing, would be off to Vermont, returning with a sunburned face and stories of sleeping in an attic with other skiers.

I remember it snowed on the night that Barbara and Jack were married, not much but a coating. That too was late October. But I was hoping for some more of those Indian Summer days, didn't Timmy and I just see swimmers two weeks ago? The neighbors are busy all putting on plows, bringing in wood. Us? Timmy is at the gym, and I told him to pick up some fundador on the way home. First things first.

Well, another Oysterfest under the belt. We had wonderful weather, warm enough that I wore my bathing suit and got sun burned a bit. Stayed at the Sea Shells, in the house I had shared with Ria in 2007....pretty much the same. In back of us at the Main House, a wedding party was there on Sunday, the young people looked so nice all dressed up going out to the wedding. Not so nice coming back in about 1am, loud yelling, laughing, talking, waking both Timmy and myself up. Just got back to sleep about 3am when a woman's screaming voice was heard, "Thanks a ff....lot for leaving me and coming back without me, I had to call three f...cabs before I got one to take me here, on and on and on, until someone calmed her down. I leaned over to Timmy and said, "Do you think that's the bride?" Timmy just said, "I think I know why they left her." The next day they were gone and things were quieter. In fact, after Columbus Day, everyone left and our car was the only one in the lot until Friday when people starting arriving to go to Oysterfest..

The Oysterfest was crowded, good weather brought thousands of people out. In the ten years we've been going, it's changed dramatically. Used to be a small table set up on Main Street where the shucking contest took place. Now there is a big commercial stage, tents filled with all kinds of food, vendors up and down the street, and barely enough room to get through. Also, everyone is on a phone. One girl checking her new earrings, lots of people trying to locate each other, and one woman at our table, checking her calories "Oh 6 oysters are only 180 calories", although from the size of her, there might have been something else on her plate. Our boy Caleb was there, amidst the Pirate Shellmen who were shucking oysters to sell. Caleb was standing in front of a large steering wheel, dressed as a pirate. When he saw me take his picture, he yelled to me "Give me your gold ARRRRR". Made me laugh with tears in my eyes.

And riding home, along the Cape Route 6, people with signs, "We are the 99%" - even in Great Barrington, which is an elite Berkshire city, there were at least 50 people demonstrating on the Main Street. That makes me glad. Glad to see that people are waking up and willing to go stand on a sidewalk and voice their opinion that our government has got to do something. I think I will start an Occupy Tivoli Movement. My sign will say, STOP THE WAR AND SAVE TRILLIONS OF $$$$$$$. Give the people the gold ARRRRR.

Well tomorrow we are off to the Cape for fun in the sun and Oysterfest. I remember years back a Columbus Day when the Murphy family went to Sherwood Island on the Long Island Sound in Connecticut on a warm day like is predicted for this year. We all went into the water even though it was October. I remember I was about 12 because Barbara had brought Jack, her boyfriend, along in the family station wagon. The beach was very rocky, and I remember him limping on the rocks to get to the water. He had hurt himself playing high school football a few days earlier. Later he found out that he had a broken leg and used crutches for a while.

I don't remember if the broken leg came before the cut up arm, when he put his arm through a glass window at Beacon High. As I remember, he ran bleeding, to Highland Hospital, a block away from the school. He needed thousands of stitches and had the scar as long as I can remember. Thinking about this, I bet today he could have sued the school for big bucks for both times - one, who would have a glass door for students, and two, don't they monitor hurt football players? But in those days, nobody sued.

Welll, back to a warm day in October. They are gifts, and if they come after a frost, are given the name Indian Summer. Tomorrow is also the Street Painting, which I will miss for the first time in 11 years - and for Tivoli, the weather is predicting in the 80's. One year for the street painting, Laura had put an unbrella in a tub of sand to get shaded while she worked. It can get dangerously hot on a hot pavement, working in the sun. In Florida at the Lake Worth Street Painting in February the younger kids are all wearing shorts and small tops, sunscreen. The older folks wear big hats and cover up. Street Paintings and Oysterfest. I love Indian Summer.

So another soap opera bites the dust. I remember my Grandmother watching this show, it was on for over 40 years. Grandma called it "All My Childrens" - cute, isn't it? Makes me worried about my show Days of Our Lives, which I have been watching for 16 years, five days a week, something like 4,000 episodes. What would I do without it?

The appeal to me is that anything can happen, the crazier, the better. This year Hope, breaking up with her husband Bo, starts taking a medicine that changes her personality at night, and she goes on a rampage, attacking men, the Mayor, other policemen (she's a cop) and even her ex, who she knocks out, pours gasoline on and is lighting him up when she is stopped. She goes to prison, where the prison matron is killing inmates and selling their body parts. Hope's cousin Jennifer gets involved and they take out her heart, put it in a cooler, then the hero doctor, replaces her heart back, and in a week she is fine. Hope solves the case, gets cleared, goes back to Bo and we go on to the next story. There are usually about 5 or 6 story lines at a time, weaving in and out during the week. Still one of my favorites is when Stefano dressed like Elvis, and seduced Susan, who had a baby EJ - Elvis Junior. Now that was early on in my watching, but Elvis is already married, divorced, married again, and has two or three kids. That's another thing about soaps, time can speed up, or slow down to a snail's pace, weeks going by and it is the same day.

People being buried alive occurs frequently, as well as babies being switched at birth. Dead cast members come back, healed and no one seems to notice. Bucky used to watch "Dark Shadows", a vampire soap opera, that my kids were hooked on as well. When in Beacon, they would all join Bucky in front of the TV every afternoon to get scared and then talk about the show for hours.

Solomon and Henry don't like Days, but they grudgingly let me watch, uninterrupted. During a commercial, Henry made the comment "Don't you just hate Judge Judy?", so I guess he puts Days on a higher scale than that. So do I.

Today feels like fall, all of a sudden the air is cold and crisp and the flannel robe hanging in the bathroom all summer is a long, lost friend. I had a memory of these kind of days, a memory of driving around the back roads of Tivoli, looking for wooley bear caterpillars. Sabra was probably three or four when she became obsessed with wooley bears. First, we found them on Clay Hill Road, taking a walk, and she picked one up and wanted to keep it. "We will need a jar or something to put him in", I told her and on our next walk we had a mason jar to hold the wooley bears. It was a good year for wooley bears, easy to find them on the road. She liked the jar, but found something even better as a home for the caterpillars - a good sized pocketbook, with a snap top.

For the next few days, we walked Clay Hill Road, up and down, looking for more wooley bears for her pocketbook. Oh, she made it nice for them, lots of grass, leaves to hide in. Wooley Bears are smart little things, when you catch them, they curl up and play dead. But in the pocketbook, they roamed up and down, looking for a way out. But still, the collection wasn't big enough.

"Get in the car", I told Sabra when she whined for more wooley bears, "We're going wooley bear hunting", and she climbed in the front seat with the yellow (I think it was yellow) purse on her lap. In those days, there were no car seats, I don't even think there were seat belts, so she had a good spot next to me to search the roads. We hit all the back roads, and when spotting a caterpillar crossing the road, I would pull over, throw the brake on, put the car in neutral and run out to catch the wooley bear before he crossed the road. Then I would bring it back to the car, Sabra would pop open her purse, and in he would go.

This would go on for hours, until we had to be home for the school bus bringing the older kids home. They would look in horror at the open purse, crawling with brown and orange caterpillars, grass all over, little caterpillar poops all over, and shake their heads in disbelief.
"Ma, how can you actually encourage this kind of behavior? This is cruel, let them all go," but Sabra would stubbornly hang onto her purse.

I can't remember how it all ended, what happened to all the caterpillars, and the crazy drives around town trying to spot a small bug crossing the road. But I am kind of glad we did it. You rarely see the wooley bears anymore, at least not in the numbers they used to be. Of course, Sabra and I might have done some damage to their numbers in our quest to get every wooley bear in the county into her yellow purse.

I've been missing Maria a lot lately, maybe because of the 9/11 ceremonies, all that grief, maybe because of fall coming, maybe because Maria the hurricane is drifting away. Anyway, after shopping at Hannaford today, I headed for the graveyard, but passed it on a whim, just wanting to see her house. As I drove up Starbarrack Road I thought of excuses I could use if anyone saw me, "checking on the apple tree in Kevin's yard" that's a good one, I concluded. Anyway, I pulled into her driveway, the house even bigger than I rememembered it. I stayed only a moment, it really didn't help and headed to her grave.

As usual, no one was around. I began deadheading the cosmos on her grave and a few tears were falling. Moving slightly, I looked up and there standing before me was the largest buck I have ever seen. Great big rack of horns, looked like something that had escaped from the Catskill Game Farm. I spoke to him, told him what a beauty he was and warned him about the upcoming hunting season. He stared at me, motionless for what seemed forever, but probably a minute of two and then slowly trotted back into the woods. "Did you see that?" I asked Ria, that probably was the sonofabitch that ate all your sunflowers. (Nothing but the stalks remain among the cosmos.)

The moment was gone, almost as if I had imagined it. But like in Harry Potter, the deer had changed the mood from sad to excited. Was it a sign, or was it just a curious giant buck that came out of the woods to see who was sniffling in his territory?

This morning, after bringing breakfast upstairs to our guests, I noticed hundreds of spider webs in the grass. Timmy hasn't cut the grass for over three weeks. His right leg hurts (actually makes a grinding noise) so he has avoided this task, though he can go to the gym twice a day, for over four hours. Go figure. Anyway, I pointed out the webs to him. They are funnel webs, made by the funnel spider, and in the center, hiding in a hole is the spider waiting for a bug. Timmy then told me that one of his earliest memories of my grandmother is her swiping away at the spider webs in her hedges. He thought that very brave as his whole family seems to be afraid of spiders. But that made me forget spiders and think of those hedges.

They were high and surrounded her house at 28 Washington Avenue. So high that Poppy would stand on a step ladder, waving hedge cutters that were attached to a long extension cord. As Poppy cut the hedges, Grandma would pick them up and cart them away. I grew up in that house with the hedges and can remember trying to peek through them to watch passers-by.
A perfect safe playground for kids.

Mrs. Chase, the next door neighbor, did not have hedges, but an iron fence, but her yard was so grown in you could barely see the house. Next to her house, the Lotsko's had the same high hedge that Grandma had. My most vivid memory of that hedge is when Tommy Lake's grandfather dropped dead in them. I remember it was a while before his body was removed, and for a long time, whenever I passed those hedges, I saw the indentation of where his body had fallen. Today I would say quite a nice way to go. I also bet Poppy and Grandma were happy that the old man made it past their hedges safely.

So, that's how spiders got me to Grandma's hedges. I think Timmy might be cutting the grass today and there will be a lot of spiders out of work for a while.