Don’t mess with Mom Nature when she’s painting. The pigments have to be just right. Here a splash of crimson, there a dab of gold, five kinds of russet – and the reason nothing rhymes with “orange” is because there is nothing else like the true orange she mixes on her autumn palette. It dries like fluorescent ginger on certain falling leaves that keeps them glowing right through dusk, twilight, evening and all but the blackest midnights. Only when first light comes do they lose their shimmer to the morning dew. So, it’s here. Royal autumn. And what is that I smell above the aromas of pumpkin and burning wood? Is it – yes, it is! – the smell of winter on the wind.

But be not afraid. That first katabatic gust rolling down from the north won’t bite you. It’s just a numbing whiff of anesthetic preparing the earth for cosmetic surgery. Soon winter’s face lift and body sculpting will begin. Sanitizing white will be everywhere and the promise of tomorrow will be deep in sleep. This is magic; and if you think winter is gloomy, dazzle yourself by stepping outside into nature’s surgical theater every day.

That said, I like to wallow in those miracles at night. Love breathing in the ether, awed by the scalpel and suction of a raging storm, or marveling at the gentle legerdemain performed by Mother Nature when she moonlights as God’s head nurse. More to come in future Sullygrams, but for now, let’s leave the trees to slowly undress while I take you back through some archives.

Always grateful when friends or fans recall things I wrote in years past. My first New York hardcover THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON (EP Dutton) and “The Mickey Mouse Olympics,” both published over three decades ago, still bring me occasional correspondence. Among more recent publications that seem to linger in memory are my contributions to the defunct blog site StorytellersUnplugged, and so I’ve decided to use some of that material in Sullygrams. Here’s an adaptation from something I titled KY JELLY & THE HEADLESS SQUIRREL around 2006 that addressed the perennial question “Where do you get your inspiration?”

The writer in me is like a person I know but whose face I keep forgetting. If I don’t make an effort to remember he’s there, he becomes a partial stranger – out of sight, out of mind. But sometimes the odyssey I live lines up like footage just waiting to be edited. For example, twenty years ago the only thing I would’ve gotten out of a recent fiasco was: they aren’t making peanut butter jars like they used to. But at this stage of my life, I got a story out of it.  

Facts: it was down-time from surgery, the lawn needed mowing, and I wanted to be outside. No story there, and I couldn’t wait to be free of the cast on my arm so that I could resume the tale of my life. The cast was from a second carpal tunnel op on my left wrist, more extensive this time, ‘cause the doc said the last one healed up so fast that the nerves didn’t have time to abate. Oh, I r from the planet Krypton, all right. You can’t slow me down. That’s why I was slicing up cardboard boxes in the garage with a sling-bladed right hand, using my feet to move the pile. Except that, without his cape, Superman fell on his ass when the cardboard skated out from under him. Pile-driver landing straight down on the healing wrist. The five stitches out of fourteen that popped wouldn’t become known until the plaster was cut off, but the forearm felt like it had been disconnected from the elbow. Didn’t register as spectacle at the time, but I’d pay big wampum now to see a clip of my feet going galley west from under me as I slashed around like Freddy Krueger in a scream flick. I had also had a little deviated septum op just prior to the carp ‘n’ tuna surgery, and the sawbones who carved up my nose told me to snort KY Jelly through my right nostril for two months. Not something I recommend for people who sneeze in allergy season (author dies with Q-tip embedded in frontal lobe), but on this day, arm in cast and head full of jelly, I sally forth to mow the lawn.

The city is tearing up the street, and the lawn is a slalom run of red utility flags. Up and down slopes, I snake, keeping an eye on broken branches hung up in the crown of a basswood tree. I bend over to throw a chunk of same off the lawn, and what should I find myself eye-balling but a headless squirrel. An eagle or an owl has left it there in my path to run over with the mower, I think – avian humor, like those crows in the ad for Windex where they close the glass patio door so that the homeowner walks into it. “Hello, decapitated squirrel, wherever your ears are,” I eulogize. Squirrel has no mouth but seems to reply, “Hello, writer.”

So, now I’m registering the day’s little adventures as my craft demands, and it keeps me from retreating to the house. Having totaled a Yardman on a landscape timber a few weeks earlier, I have a new Toro. Might as well change the break-in oil while the mower is still warm, right?

This is where the peanut butter jar comes in. One-armed man takes off his belt and ties it around the mower to keep the motor running until the gas burns off, and with pants falling down, concocts a Rube Goldberg arrangement to tip the Toro so that the oil runs into a plastic peanut butter jar sitting on the drive. Soft plastic? Hot oil? Yes, Bunky, I did that. The jar immediately begins to shrink into a puddle as black as the robe of the Wicked Witch of the East (“I’m melting, melting…what a world, what a world!”). Fade to black, very black, as in Black Sea flowing down the drive. Tut-tut. I’m a writer; this is material. But when I’m finally done cleaning up, the plaster cast looks like a slab of licorice chewed to bits by a Rottweiler.

At this point, a non-writer muggle would call it a day. A smart writer would assume the womb position and suck his thumb. The fact that I’m neither and am actually stoked by this Alice-in-Wonderland sequence, bespeaks my nature. But play follows work, right? I can do my usual rollerblading at nearby Elm Creek (one of the country’s largest municipal nature preserves), I decide. Endorphins are already flowing mellow in my papier-mâché brain, so I blade my 16-mile loop, and the grubby arm cast gets soaked with sweat. I hit the highway for home, holding the cast into the wind out the window to dry my wrist up to where the plaster seals to the forearm. Another golden day in paradise, and all is cool. The air wafting into the car is cool. The breeze flooding into the cast is cool. But when something not so cool suddenly pricks me inside the cast, I commence an out-of-body experience. Is that my arm out there and has a piece of sharp plaster broken off? Plaster doesn’t buzz, Sully.

Are the visuals coming through? Sailing down the expressway with a trapped UFI (Unidentified Flying Insect) furious at its flesh and plaster prison. Beating the cast against the outside of the car door, I must look like a teenager keeping time to a dashboard stereo. The remaining stitches are on fire, indistinguishable from venomous stings. Twisting brings on a Charlie horse in the surgically weakened wrist. When I finally exit the expressway, copious fragments of something metallic blue shake out of the cast, along with a shred of red. I committed homocide on a June beetle (insecti-cide?). My cowardly mind exaggerated the injuries, but I am convinced the Red Baron flew his bi-plane in there and left a thread from his scarf.

Like the bits of organic matter that shook out of my cast, unrelated bits of stories collect like that for a writer. You just have to learn to recognize them when they happen and put frames around them. It’s how you see life while it’s happening and how you savor it afterward that add up to perspective and larger statements. A writer collects anecdotes to summon up for details and meaning as they connect the dots of sheer living.

Speaking of writers, be it known for those of you who know and love Mary Lou Shefsky that her fabulous experiences from Peace Corp Days in Latin America are captured in a terrific book she has written called LOVE AND LATRINES (in the Land of Spiderweb Lace), richly photographed and available on Amazon!

And trick-or-treat: the August-September photos are below.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan