“Are you a melancholy person, in general?” the painter asked.

I was on the Zoom call for fun. It was all artists and me, identifying myself as “a writer and a crafter,” so they’d know that I knew I was an interloper. I was playing, eavesdropping, and scavenging—always scavenging.

They let me talk through an idea for a piece of writing, about a magic school door and babies and parenthood and competing perceptions. It’s all been swirling in my mind. It’s September. My own baby is back to school. My mom’s earthly birthday has come and gone again. The ragweed is irritating my sinuses.

“Are you melancholy?” the painter wanted to know. She wondered because she also believed it about herself. It had revealed itself with the passage of time, especially as her kids grew. People saw it in her art and said things like, “It’s so beautiful and sad.”

“It’s why I took the grocery store job,” the painter admitted. Her kids left home, and there was nothing for the ache of their absence: she had to get around young people. Three shifts a week took the edge off. Maybe you just trend that way, she seemed to suggest.

Time is working something on me, too. Beautiful and sad, beautiful and sad. September is on its way to October, and I’ve become obsessed with this idea about an Omaha costume shop that closed after 30-odd years. What would I give, I wonder, to walk its aisles again? The blue-and-white checkerboard floor. The rubbery smell of Halloween masks. Bags of party favors—plastic “gems” on rings, bouncy balls, tiny alien head pencil toppers in that early 90s light green. If it were possible to go back, what would I pay?

I knew I’d need to look it up, later, because “melancholy” didn’t feel right in my mouth. It was getting lost in there, like if I said it a few more times, it would just get swirled around in its own echoey nonsense. Slide sideways off my tongue, nothing to stand on.

“To write is to ruminate,” I said told the painter. That’s the whole deal. “Especially in nonfiction. I lived something, and then I’m going to live it again, in one particular way, on the page.”

“Ruminate” felt familiar, and it is something different. Melancholy is sad with no obvious cause. But I’m walking the aisles of the past, wondering what I missed.

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