The almanac says don’t redecorate until mid-November

This weekend, take back one room in your house.

The Farmers’ Almanac has its Venus retrograde guide up for this season, which opened October 3. Under the word Avoid, between starting a new romance and making big financial moves, it lists major aesthetic decisions: haircut, tattoo, redecorating.

Fair enough. Nobody needs a neck tattoo in the middle of a heartbreak. But keep scrolling down the same page.

•••

Under Watch for: exes resurfacing. Under Embrace: reconnecting with people from the past.

Read those together. The paint stays in the can and the phone stays on the pillow. Guess which door that leaves open? Not the one to your own living room.

To be fair to the almanac, it is a season guide, not a sales pitch. I paid for the sales pitch. In 2014 a reader I believed told me not to rearrange a single thing until spring, so the energy in the house would still recognize Danny when he came back.

What the hold costs

My kitchen table was the office of the waiting. Laptop, a legal pad of reading dates, the phone face up beside the salt. For most of fourteen months I ate dinner standing at the counter, because sitting at that table meant sitting with the legal pad, and Judge learned to beg at hip height.

“But it’s retrograde. Shouldn’t I at least wait until it’s over?”

Wait on the tattoo if you like. A room is not an aesthetic decision. It is where you eat, sleep and open your own mail, and if it has been on hold since he left, it was on hold long before any planet turned around.

Am I telling you the sky means nothing? I read cards for a living, and Judge has watched me look up a Mercury station before booking the dentist. I’d be throwing stones from inside a house full of tarot decks.

What I won’t do anymore is let a season sign for my house. I did it once. The bill was $2,400, fourteen months, and a job in Savannah I turned down that spring in case he came back and things got complicated.

I took the table back the first night of May, when the reader’s month had come and gone. One plate, one fork, a chair pulled all the way in. It felt ridiculous for about four minutes, and then it felt like dinner.

Here is the move, cut to its smallest version. Twenty minutes, one room, before Sunday night. No paint, no new furniture, nothing the almanac would object to.

•	Pick the room you walk past fastest.
•	Take out one object that belongs to the waiting. A box in the closet counts. Archive, not trash.
•	Bring in one thing that belongs to you: a lamp, a plant, the good chair from the other room.
•	Use the room for an ordinary thing before Sunday night: coffee, a nap, a phone call to a friend.

01	Which room in your house do you walk past fastest, and since when?

02	What are you keeping exactly in place so it will look familiar if he walks in?

03	If the house were only yours to arrange, which chair would you move first?

Release, if that is where this goes, is not the consolation prize. It is a full outcome, and the only one you can produce without his signature.

Whatever he decides this season, the lamp is yours, the chair is yours, and Saturday morning is yours to sit down in.