And all the birds are singing, so I sang along

It is my birthday. I am forty-two years old, which makes me the age of I have no idea which fictional characters. I woke to a card from my godmother and a book from choco_frosh, which delighted me even before I opened it by being an accidentally large print edition formerly of a library in Pontypool. It is a hard year to want to celebrate. I am eating a homemade pear butter sandwich. The sky is overcast, but pieces of autumn keep slipping through.

Like waves on the sea, I was just where I should be

I had a quiet birthday with my parents and my husbands and autumn. Just before sunset, rushthatspeaks and spatch and I walked a meandering loop of the Great Meadows that took us past the low-tussocked marsh that was dry hollows in last summer's drought, a soft-winged owl taking flight after prey, and an office chair sitting empty in a stand of pines, exactly like an invitation to avoid.

( All she said was I'm just drifting. )

choco_frosh had gotten me Peter Davison's Is There Life Outside The Box?: An Actor Despairs (2016). nineweaving sent the 25th anniversary edition of John Crowley's Little, Big (1981) exquisitely wrapped in the Great Wave off Kanagawa. The short stack of books also contained Eckart Frahm's Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023), R.B. Lemberg's Everything Thaws (2023), and Sarah Monette's A Theory of Haunting (2023). My niece made a tele-appearance in her pneumatically eared unicorn hat. The cake was marmalade, decorated with whipped cream like the candle-whiskered face of a cat. I am not sure anyone got a picture of the smoldering rose of the sunset glimpsed between houses as we walked back for dinner, but it was spectacular. It felt like October.