THE FARMER'S ALMANAC

         It's nine o'clock on a September Friday morning and Noelle is at the door. I am standing on the other side of the screen in my robe, my hair soaking wet and my body not totally dried. She asks if I remember her; I do after I check out her car in the driveway. She has stopped because she remembers that I have a cat. In driving up my road to work, she has encountered a dead feline fifty yards on. She is worried that it is mine.

         For a split-second my stomach drops, but then I remember that my Susie was sleeping on my bed when I finally made my way into the shower. Murphy has been working with a vengeance this morning. My newspaper and I had entered the bathroom only to be routed out by the telephone. I assumed it was Pamela and rushed to get it. It was a woman, but from Taconic Telephone Company. She informed me that they wouldn't make it today to install a jack. The job would have to wait until Tuesday.

         I think I had turned the water on when I heard the jangle of a bell again. "Is this the clinic?" "No, they are 6650." I know all the alternate numbers; the hairdresser is 3550 and Motor Vehicles IS 3350, but with an 828 exchange, not 392. For the record, the Ooms Dairy Farm no longer has this number.

         As the hot water revives me, I keep waiting for the third shoe to drop. It is kind enough to wait until I turn off the spigot and grab my towel. I hear the clatter of paws on linoleum and parquet, and the warm-up of her dulcet tones. Something is undoubtedly going by on the road. It’s probably a tractor, but when the barks continue, and I can hear her feet pounding the floor, I know it is someone or something on our property. I assume it is the man from the electric company to read the meter, but I put on my robe and head for the living room to make sure.

         Noelle first appeared on the doorstep in the fall of 1999. She had called about the dog crate I had advertised for sale at the local post office. With her on that first trip was her companion, a slightly older middle-age man. They lived and still reside in Stuyvesant, ten miles away. They needed a crate for their new pup. With me on that first visit was Morgan, unaware that within a month doctors would find the first of the failings of her heart. She was not well that day, I recall.

         I showed them how to assemble the enclosure; they measured the crate, and all agreed it would do fine. We discussed crate training and how lovable it made our dog. They drove off with their prize. I would see them again in Walmart occasionally; they would inquire of Morgan's health. I would reciprocate by asking of their dog and his progress.

         It must have been early in the summer of 2000 when Noelle stopped on her way home. I was cutting grass in the back when I saw Morgan and a woman standing near a car. I propelled the mower to a short distance away, turned it off, and joined the conversation. Noelle did not know that was the last time she would see my wife. She stopped last summer again. We commiserated in the small talk that usually develops when one person is given an answer that they didn't want to hear, and the other has grown weary of breaking bad news.

         Now on this September morning she is relieved that I won't be giving her another dose, and while we both feel sorry for the cat on the road, she moves on to the normal 'how are you making out?' questions. I put on my dancing shoes and tap out a happy refrain. I'm not quite dressed to invite her in for a spot of tea, so the conversation winds its way down to "I'd better get on to work, now." As I return to the bedroom to dress, I wonder to myself what coincidence will bring us together next year.

         As soon as I let her outside, the dog gives the spot where Noelle stood a good sniff but must find nothing interesting, for in a second she is ambling around the side of the house to see what is there. I follow; this will give me time to garner any possible harvest of black walnuts that have dropped. The first fell the evening before; it was small, but I brought it in and put it in a dry spot. Margaret, my employee and neighbor, and best friend Pamela want me to save some for them. Both promise to make me a black walnut cake.

         "A black walnut falling from forty feet could kill a person if it hit him on the head, and one laying in the grass will sprain, if not break, an ankle if stepped on unwittingly." I wrote this to a friend in October 2000, and included it in my first public appearance as a writer. Morgan missed my debut; she was a patient in the geriatric-psychiatric unit of Samaritan Hospital in Troy. She'd been hospitalized on September 13th and wouldn't be home until Thanksgiving. I was adapting to living alone.

         The walnut harvest that year was prolific; last year there were few. My sweet tooth prays for a bumper crop this fall. The sentimentalist that hides in me will try to equate Noelle's visits with the black walnut harvest; he will use his license to manipulate the reader. I won't permit this; I will tell him to get back in his cubbyhole and wait his turn. I can’t place the coming of Noelle with any precision. The woman from Stuyvesant at the door will not foretell a trend. For all I can remember, she arrived after the first frost that first year and after the walnuts had dropped from the tree.

         I can only attach descriptive and capitalized nouns to each of the four walnut crops I’ve witnessed:

Hope for our new house and life;
Pain as I witness Morgan’s decline;
Despair yielding to Hope again as a new friend appears;
And now, Rebirth, as my friend and I become part of each others’ destiny.

         Through the four autumns, I have put my records in writing, like a good meteorologist. If the phone doesn’t ring, and the dog doesn’t bark, and a visitor does not appear at my door, I shall sit at my desk, check my accounts, and compile The Black Walnut Farmer’s Almanac.

Valatie Sept 7, 2002