It has snowed four times this fall already and I'm starting to think that, this year, trees are idiots. Usually at the first snow, trees will dump their leaves because they know if they don't, their boughs will bow down uncomfortable with the weight of snow and soaking leaves, pulling the trunk into an awkward slouchy hunch, and eventually breaking, leaving the tree ever closer to death. Right? If all of that was bound to happen to you if you didn't let go of your leaves... wouldn't you just let go of the damn leaves?

Not this year. Every time it snows, the trees are like, "Well it's only September/October, so my eyes (feeling sensors) must be deceiving me. I must be hallucinating. Therefore I shall keep all my leaves! And maybe turn them red, but definitely not let them fall!"

The most recent snow, the one that hasn't really stopped yet as of right now, has dumped at least a foot of snow. The trees all look like gnarled old men, hanging onto their leaves stubbornly with old withered fingers. They dangle their branches mere feet from the sidewalk, sodden and pendulous. Anyone over 4 feet tall has to walk in the street or else become ensnared in vindictive tangles.

As the trees get dumber, squirrels get smarter. Any squirrel who's still alive must be. I was walking home from the grocery store with branches grabbing my hair and wrapping themselves around my backpack, and I saw a little rise in the snow with a big tunnel in it. I stopped to look down into the tunnel, and saw that at the bottom was (or had once been) a topless pumpkin. A squirrel was curled up in the bottom of the pumpkin, fat and sleeping. He had clearly been eating his nice warm home.

Every Tuesday I sort of wish it will snow so there won't be a softball game. This, after I spent all my time looking up a softball league that would have me after ten years of not playing at all. I wanted something that would get me into shape in a nonthreatening way (rugby, my last try two years ago, turned out to be a threatening way indeeed; the warmup mile run alone was too much to start with, and the fact that I was the lightest person there at 150 pounds was practically a guarantee that I would be in the hospital before the end of the season) and would shape my week a little bit, force me to compartmentalize my time.

But now I just wish it would snow. Snow or be warm. As much as I want to have something to do when I'm alone in my house, when I do have something to do, and it's stressful, I wish it were optional. Actually, it's probably simpler than that; softball, for me, means biking four or five miles down to the fields on the outskirts of town, and when the game's over and I'm exhausted, either biking back (all uphill) or going out to the main road and waiting a half hour for a bus - this all when it's at or around freezing and the wind is howling. For everyone else, they just have to jump in their cars, drive there, play, jump in their cars, drive back. Simple as that.

It's a sacrifice I make, not having a car, and I like to think it's for the good of the environment, so I can gloat, and not just because I don't have the money, which is probably much closer to the truth. I oscillate between liking it and not. Sometimes when I'm struggling against the wind with both handlebars wobbling with the weight of my groceries and it's starting to snow and cars are sweeping by me at close range and sometimes honking, I get frustrated and angry to the point where it's not even in line anymore with the situation. But later, thinking about it, I think, what do I not have that these people in their cars do?

I used to think nothing. I used to think I had nothing less, and that I was actually gaining something - exercise, and time spent outdoors. Things like that. I disagree with myself now. I'm definitely short on something these people have, and that's the freedom to just go out at a whim and have fun without getting weighed down with the consequences of when's the bus running, what are the intervals, how cold is it, will it snow, which way is the wind blowing, can I ride my bike into it, has someone stolen my bike light, how long will this take, will I be able to get any sleep tonight once I get home?

Because of all these questions running through my head, I often decide just not to go anywhere because it's too much trouble, and my life becomes more monotonous instead of more colorful. And yes, I realize that this is ridiculously whiny and specific about a problem that's not a problem at all, compared to the rest of the problems of the world, and yes, I realize that I could just not think about all those things and go anyway and deal with the consequences as they happen, but that's not who I am, and these are the consequences that riding a bike has, for me, and this is how it's been and now I go nowhere more often than I go somewhere. It makes me sad.

There are flashes, sometimes, where I think that I have gone crazy, that this is it and from now on I won’t know where I am or what’s really happening to me, that life from now on is a daydream and nothing else, that I might think I’m in bed with a lover, but really, I’m in a straitjacket and in a morphine drip, or that I may think I’m studying law, but I’m babbling somewhere on the ground. In a hospital. In a coma. Severely schizophrenic.

I’ve always been occasionally seized with the fear of becoming schizophrenic; I exhibit more than half of the warning signs for late-onset. But the episodes where I feel crazy, where I’m not sure that what’s happening is what I see, and vice versa, aren’t scary. They’re merely curious.

Yesterday after work it was snowing, and snowing hard. Big enough flakes that I could catch them in my mouth, and slightly quench my thirst. I couldn’t help doing that even though I was on a busy road and grown women aren’t supposed to be catching snowflakes in their mouths, so I got a lot of curious looks, some honks, one trailing hoot of laughter and a lone shout that was meant to be an insult, I guess, but I didn’t quite catch it and even if I had, it wouldn’t have registered. The sky was low and gray enough that the mountains were completely obscured, and strangely, it was sort of warm. The asphalt made the snow sparkle. I was waiting for the bus to take me to Barnes and Noble, even though I could have walked. I should have walked. In the state I was in I wouldn’t have even felt my feet hit the ground.

In Barnes & Noble I was in the bathroom and I was studying the pattern in the tiles. I know the tile pattern of every bathroom I’ve spent any amount of time in; the number of rows before a repeat, how they have to adjust to turn the corner or go up a wall, or, those crafty places where it’s both a corner and a wall. 3-D pattern adjustment. Obsessive-compulsive. On resumés I call it ‘attention to detail’. I forget I’m on the toilet, extrapolate the pattern to Spirographs and mosaic magnets, those indistinct games from when I was a toddler. The bathroom tiles in Los Angeles, the pieces that have been dislodged by earthquakes, upsetting the pattern and upsetting me in the process. I colored the holes yellow with crayons. I did. When I visit there years later I can still see the impressions.

When I snap back into myself and I’m still on the toilet, I have lost time and suddenly I’m not entirely sure I’m in the bookstore bathroom. It seems entirely plausible that I may have begun daydreaming at work, at the grocery store, at the tall pants boutique, and absentmindedly dropped my pants and assumed toilet position. Though this has never happened before, it seems likely that it could, that it is happening at the moment, that if I pinched myself hard enough I’d open my eyes to a new background... as if were dreaming. How do I get out of this? I can’t. How do I find out if I’m at work, in a store?

Wait for someone to shake me. Yell at me. Inject me with drugs, take me to the hospital. But the world feels so weird that I doubt any of those things would work. Any dream world that seizes me with tile patterns has to be too strong for such remedies. Any dream world that makes me feel this light and airy has to be a dream.

I walk out of the store. How much time have I spent? It’s still light, but the world has flipped. The sky is cloud-streaked blue and the sun is setting and it isn’t snowing anymore. The gray has evaporated. It feels like a different day. Maybe it is. The sun has brought out sparrows and women teetering on heels and the women’s heels look to me like bird beaks, pounding, pounding, pounding the asphalt.