Last month my husband and I missed a wonderful event. We missed it because we didn’t  know the event existed until a big woolly bear ambled up our driveway.

Woolly bears are the caterpillar of the Isabella Tiger Moth. The moths are seldom seen as they only live about two weeks and come out at night. The charismatic woolly bear caterpillar, on the other hand, is a common sight in fall and is said to be a predictor of the severity of the winter ahead. After spotting this large, fluffy larva, I was motivated to find out what its stripe indicated and how this folklore started.

Woolly bear myths have been around since Colonial times, but went viral in 1948 when  Dr. Howard Curran, the curator of entomology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, did a study in Bear Mountain, New York. He took along a reporter from the New York Herald Times. Dr. Curran found and measured the bands on about fifteen woolly bear specimens. He subsequently validated the myth that a wide rust-colored band in the middle of the larva’s body meant a severe winter ahead. News services around America picked up the resulting newspaper article that the caterpillar was a seer.

Scientists today debunk his findings. Current and more controlled studies indicate that the bands actually indicate what happened the PREVIOUS spring. The better the growing season, the shorter the rust-colored band will be and the longer the black ones.

In the midst of my woolly bear research, I discovered that four woolly bear festivals are held in America each October. The longest running one is in Vermilion, Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. Highlights include a two hour parade, woolly bear races and a costume contest.

Who could imagine that a lowly worm could be the inspiration for the largest one day festival in the state of Ohio?

I am cancelling the Suitcase Lady Blog for this week. I hope to return next week.

My blog began ten years ago as a direct reaction to the Iraq War. America was whipped up into a war frenzy, eager to send its volunteer army of poor people’s children off to fight a “glorious war”. My family, friends and I were struggling to keep some semblance of our sanity in the midst of this madness.

I decided to take time each week to dwell on the positive side of our private lives; to take a short vacation from worry. I created the blog to be a reminder of the joy all of us can find in nature, the arts, architecture, food, travel, laughter and love.

The election tomorrow will be a watershed moment for America. The choice is between Hillary or hatred; the rule of law or the rule of mobs and guns.

It’s hard to have a positive thought at the moment. Fear is all consuming.

My books were checked out and I was leaving the library. But then I spotted a new book which was too good to resist, The Public Library, A Photographic Essay by Richard Dawson. I returned to the check out kiosk.

Eighteen years and many road trips in the making, this intriguing book is filled with a cross section of America’s libraries; large and small, historic and modern, opulent and shabby, treasured and abandoned. Sprinkled throughout are reflections from Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, E.B. White, Dr. Seuss and others.

The juxtaposition of the photographs is mesmerizing as it starkly portrays how American values are changing. “Free” and “public” are seldom used words in our current age. But as Bill Moyers so aptly observes,”When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open.”

Having spent the past thirty summers presenting programs in over 160 libraries within a 200 mile radius of my home, I started contemplating all the varied library buildings I have worked in. Frequently, a tiny rural village will have an impressive library that is the result of a community’s fund raising campaign. But I have also worked in strip mall libraries and storefronts. I must note that I’ve never met a library I didn’t like. In retrospect, I should have photographed each one.

Here is a sampling…

I know exactly where I want to be on Halloween night. I want to be in Beverly Hills, California, at 516 Walden Drive, just off Wilshire Boulevard and Santa Monica. Unfortunately, our travel budget is a bit strained and this will not be happening.

My wish is to visit the Witch’s House, a.k.a. the Spadena House, a beloved Beverly Hills landmark. A witch does not live in the house; Michael J. Libow, a real estate agent, is the current owner. Even sans witch, this quirky house rates a view.

The Witch’s cottage was not always situated in the flats of Beverly Hills…..as opposed to the hills of Beverly Hills where the really rich and supposedly non-witchy people live. This fairy tale structure was designed by Harry Oliver in 1921 and built on the lot of Willat Studio in Culver City. It housed the studio’s offices and dressing rooms and doubled as a movie set. Harry Oliver described his creation as “English Cottage Fantasy Architecture”.

When the studio went out of business, the house faced demolition. A producer, Ward Lascelle, came to its rescue and moved it to Beverly Hills in 1926. He and his wife Lucille turned it into a functioning home. They eventually divorced, and Lucille got the house and a new husband with the last name of Spadena, the official name of the house to this day.

The house changed hands again in 1965 when it was purchased by the Green family who lived there until 1997. Toward the end of their tenure, the house fell into serious disrepair. Most prospective buyers saw it as a tear down.

Michael J. Libow, who grew up in the area, was its savior. He bought it for $1.3 million, the price of the lot, and invested a small fortune and ten years to faithfully restore the exterior and make massive, but witch appropriate improvements to the interior. He also credits the famed Catalonian architect, Antonio Gaudi, as inspiration for the revamped interiors and garden structures.

The Spadena House was made a historic landmark by the City of Beverly Hills in 2013 and will remain the ultimate trick or treating destination for generations to come. Mr. Libow is expecting around 3,000 plus kids this year.

The upcoming Presidential election seems to be a choice between Democracy and decency or demagoguery, racism and misogyny. This surreal situation has landed many of us in a state of constant stress.

Stress is harmful to health. Lately, I have been hearing much advice from the media and friends on how to stay sane in the midst of this electoral madness.

One suggested option is wine…..lots of wine. My guess is that liquor stores are seeing an uptick in sales. However, drinking oneself into oblivion, while tempting, is probably not the wisest solution.

Meditation and slow breathing are also proffered as anxiety reducing techniques. Unfortunately, some of us don’t get any results from mindful breathing except slower breaths……the mind still races full speed ahead.

My only escape from the current political scene is reading. I have been checking out piles of books from my library and making sure the books are by my favorite authors.  Recently, I was overjoyed to get Alexander McCall Smith’s latest book in his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series entitled Precious and Grace. For three blissful, stress escaping hours, I read the book straight through.

Alexander McCall Smith is a medical ethicist by profession, and his books are not detective novels. They are, however, about the mystery of love and human nature.

Here is an excerpt from Precious and Grace:

Mma Ramotswe smiled. It was some time since she had heard the word skellum, as it seemed to have passed out of favour. Yet it was such a fine word, that so effectively described a rogue or a rascal; a word that her father had used eloquently, picked up from the Boers, when describing dealers who paid poor farmers too little for their cattle, or traders who doctored their scales so that they could give short shrift to buyers of sorghum or maize meal. Obed Ramotswe had seen these as skellums and would call them that to their face; now, perhaps, the skellums could get away with it because people were afraid to stand up to them, or were no longer sure what was right or wrong, or were afraid to identify wickedness or sleaze when they saw it.