As a child, the start of every month would mean I'd wake, gummy-eyed, and mutter softly to myself before saying good morning to anyone, Rabbit, Rabbit. Before the age of Google and despite having been rather a voracious young reader, I heard this on Nickelodeon, and latched on to it as I always had and would always be terribly superstitious. I had no notion of why I was doing it, only that if I didn't, I was cheating myself out of a very real opportunity to plot the course of the next thirty-odd days with a little more luck than I would have otherwise. And I felt - jinxing, horoscope-reading, avoiding stepping on cracks even when I was very, very angry with my mother child that I was - that I needed all of the luck that I could get. To earn better than a B on my math tests. To get picked to play the xylophone. To hold hands with a boy. To turn invisible when it was my turn to do a somersault in gym class (or dribble a basketball, or get picked for kickball, or climb the rope).

Now a new month just means I get paid and can, after paying my credit card bill, break my financial fast from iced coffee and frozen yogurt. I am especially guilty in the summer of finding very little to look forward to but autumn, each month one nearer to November - which is when it comes to Ohio, these days. There is nothing so wondrous or flexible as the faith I had as a child that something small I did could change the whole course of things, unless it's averting an argument with my husband by loading the dishwasher. How grim and dull adulthood is.

I think that's why I write.

This morning a cardinal alighted on one of our patio chairs, his feathered tail bobbing like a lure. As a girl I would've held my breath, beginning a silent recitation of the alphabet. I'd read in an enormous tome of American folklore - one of many acquisitions from school book sales, where I'd find the book with the best amount of pages for my (mother's) buck - that when you saw a red bird land, the letter on your lips at the moment he flew away again was the first letter of the last name of the man you were going to marry. I would never have admitted to cheating, but the haste with which I spoke my As, Bs, and Cs or the languid lines of L and M and N and O and P had everything to do with the unlucky classmate I fancied and nothing with the familiar melody of the alphabet.

My romantic superstitions were not restricted to girlhood. In high school I bent the tabs off of Dr. Pepper cans while repeating the same, and kept a chain of letters on a cord around my neck, spelling the name of my beloved. Why pearls when you can have aluminum? K and I also revisited the book, our Avonlea sensibilities satisfied by the sweetest temptation of them all: swallow a thimble full of salt before bed, and dream of the man you will marry bringing you a glass of water.

I imagined, so ardently did I love at sixteen, that he would bring me whole lengths of rivers in his arms.

And so we did just that, of course, not the stupidest thing we'd ever done but certainly the thing with the farthest reaching consequences. Though I did not learn to cook for years, it was many years even after that I would consent to season anything with salt. We didn't see anything, and none of these boys grew up to be the man I married.

No matter how much growing up I do, there are still so very many ways to be foolish about love.