We finally have money again, and it feels great to have at least one thing going well now. After months of stress and tight budgets and a serious job search, we’re suddenly better off now than before the lockdowns. I knew fall would be a magic season.

We even got some back pay for the months Robot worked for free, which is good because our 40-year-old oven died the same weekend we got the money. Our new oven–which we can now afford without going bankrupt–arrives Tuesday. We’re all impatient to get cooking again. We’ve made do with our backyard grill and microwave, but we miss things like soup and homemade bread.

Aside from the oven drama, we’ve been puttering around, hiding from the pandemic and the election drama around here. Our town has become a virus hotspot, so kids are still sort of in school but can’t visit friends or do after school activities. Our neighborhood has a ton of Halloween decorations because everyone’s so bored, but there’s no trick-or-treating this year. Since my kids are getting too old for it anyway, I promised we’d buy a bunch of candy and watch scary movies all night. We might even do a watch party with their aunt in Texas and cousin in Maryland to make things more festive.

On a more serious note, I’m going to make more effort this year to commune with my beloved dead. Samhain is the traditional time for it, but I haven’t been in the right headspace for it since my dad died. My whole life, he was so engulphed in my mom’s personality disorder, so helpless in the face of it, that we didn’t have much of a relationship separate from my mom and her illness. I always had this ridiculous fantasy that my mom would die first and I’d finally have a relationship with my dad, and when he died I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t feel right honoring my ancestors without honoring Dad first and foremost, but I wasn’t ready to deal with the mess of emotions that came with that. But this year, I think I’m ready to start.

But enough of that for now. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been just puttering around, taking care of myself, doing little projects. Knitting arm warmers from leftover sweater yarn, doing some light reading, putting up the Halloween legos, picking my next big knitting project. I’ve had my eye on it for a while, but I only bought the yarn a couple days ago and it’s still in the mail. I watched Curon on Netflix, an Italian horror series dubbed into English. It was interesting. I’m in the middle of The Haunting of Bly Manor now, and though it’s not as heartwrenching and thrilling so far as Hill House, I don’t hate it. I’ve been taking long walks and listening to podcasts. Cults is doing a month-long feature on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which has been weirdly nostalgic for me. It’s always weird to realize your childhood is history now.

I used to treat things like this–a good meal, a hank of yarn, watching a movie with family–as mere distractions, things to keep me sane and moving while I found something deeper, my true purpose, the true meaning of life. But at some point I realized there probably isn’t one “true meaning” of life, and these “distractions” aren’t just distractions. Maybe, in bits and pieces, these little details woven together are the “meaning of life.” I don’t know if this is true, but I know that the more I think this way, the more healthy and happy I get. The other day I had that rare moment where a total stranger says perfectly what you’ve been trying so long to articulate–this person said that in looking for something deeper, they’d been “hacking away at the nacre of the pearl.” If I keep hacking away, I don’t get something better, I just get an irritating grain of sand. So instead, I’m trying to protect the pearl, adding layers one “distraction” at a time.