The leaves have turned color much earlier than I would have expected, and the weather during the first part of the month was cool and wet—which I enjoyed. This last week, the daytime temperatures are to return to the mid-70s, and there is no rain in the forecast. That’s just as well, since Al has decided to take a vacation week to get to some of the fall chores.

One of the chores is to figure how to keep the wasps out of the gazebo. It looks to me as though they once more are trying to build a nest in the peak where the ceiling beams meet at the hub. I have stuffed tissues in the cracks to be filled as temporary plugs, and I’ve put the foam blocks into the ventilation spaces between walls and roof.

I shouldn’t think this would be a good place for wasps to winter over. The sun shining into the gazebo warms this small space into the high 30s and even 40s, which must interfere with the insects’ protective winter sleep. Yet I hear them bouncing off the windows as they try to bully their way through the glass. The screens are worse, because they are convinced that just a little more work will see them through to the other side…just a bit more searching, and a hole will certainly be found.

Sometimes I get that way about barriers in life. Just a little more bullying, persistence, searching, persuading, or pretending, and I’ll fight my way through. It’s not that way, though. Every year I have great plans, plans that I almost could have achieved the previous year,  and every year I’m just a little less able to carry them out. MCS/fragrance sensitivities do wear on the system, even though I have spent the majority of my life since college graduation avoiding everything and not letting anyone close. During my school years I spent the majority of my time outside of school either out in the woods and fields or locked in my room with a stack of books. During my college years and after, I simply spent a lot of time walking and singing to myself. Jazz songs and songs from Broadway musicals.

Now? I still write, and the frustration at not being able to draw has vanished as I become better at taking photos that speak for me when I have no words.

My vivid imagination may be more of a hindrance than a help, since I am never bored. The world inside my own mind is…not real in the same sense that the outer world is real, but intricate and absorbing in ways that external reality has never been. That may be because I never paid much attention to it. We’ve existed in parallel, I can go through a lot of the motions, but it’s not surprising to me that I spent my early years convinced that I’d been dropped here by people from another world and that someday they would recall where they left me and return. (I’m not surprised to have learned, either, that one of my sisters harbored a similar conviction.)  A stranger in a strange land? I wouldn’t know how not to be.