Staring at a blank piece of paper and waiting for words to magically assemble themselves never worked for me. I learned long ago that if I don’t know what to write, I just start writing. It doesn’t matter what I write. Putting pen to paper, typewriter to ribbon, or electrons to screen somehow starts my motor running. I might start typing about a quick brown fox and end up with a paragraph on mandolins. It always perplexed me to pass by a fellow writer, motionless, mouth agape, hands on a keyboard, wholly convinced that they were writing. No, they were not. Ah well! To each their “process.”
The late October weather in north-central Kentucky has turned seasonably warm. Fronts, however, are shuffling our way. Showers are in the forecast for the next few days, and the beginning of the week will bring our first proper overnight freezes, with temps in the 20s. Trick-or-treaters will be hiding their costumes under coats.
Since moving out of a traditional development several years ago, we don’t get any candy snafflers on Halloween. Here in the sticks at Squirrel Manor, the road is a little too narrow, too remote, and the homes too far apart to attract them. I’ve been a little nervous on past Halloweens that some brave rural kiddo would ring our doorbell, and I would be caught empty-handed, with no candy in the house. So, today, I picked up a supply of “fun size” Skittles just in case. If they last till Halloween, I’ll be surprised.
The birdbath is clean, and its built-in heater is ready for duty during the frigid nights ahead.

Thought In Memory Of Thomas Brown
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
Galileo Galilei