When my girls were little, I occasionally sang a few lines from an old song — just around the corner there’s a rainbow in the sky, so let’s all have another cup of coffee.

For the record, neither daughter is a fan of this song, or of my singing, at all.

These days, there’s no around the corner, or, if there is, we’re just not looking there. Election? Halloween? That once eternal late-fall slide towards the holidays and whatever those might bring….

In a strange kind of way, this hovers on relief — no worries this year about whether we’ll have any family at our holiday table — the divorced mother’s woe — as the answer is clear: we won’t.

In the void, we move from cup of coffee to a spontaneous late afternoon walk with a friend. And the fall foliage is still mighty fine.