Autumnal

As the calendar turns to October we are in full color. I sit in the kitchen and have a bird’s eye view of a brilliant orange maple waving from the bottom of the sheep pasture. The deeper shades surrounding it serve to make the tree seem to explode from the forest. Each morning I arrange my stool so I have this same viewpoint as I eat my yogurt.

Driving on I-89 we elbow-poke each other and point to notice a particularly amazing patch of foliage. The mountains rise up as the leaves weave a colored pattern across them. A cloudy day often gives best viewing, but the sun breaking out and lighting isolated patches, like a curtain rising on the first act, is brilliant.

A light breeze causes a chaos of leaves to spin and swirl to the dirt road below which then remains dotted with color, a path laid to follow. I remember days of telling my children to “quick, quick catch a leaf as it falls for good luck,” I find myself looking up in hopes one will swoop close enough for me to catch it. I’ll hold it to my nose to smell autumn and laugh out loud at my good luck.

It was a beautiful summer. The temperatures were moderate but warm enough to plunge into the cold river for an afternoon swim. Much of the months the skies remained the pale, cornflower blue of summer. Wisps of clouds looked like hands reaching to the sun or streaks of white paint carelessly tossed onto a canvas. As September begins I miss bare feet for a moment. But when the first chilly morning arrives and my feet land on a cold floor, I am ready for the hundred-year-old wood stove that our kitchen centers around to come back to work after a summer off. The familiar clunk of wood being put into its belly warms me. The slow, orange flicker I see through the draft begins to come to life and the stove groans and creaks. I push my socked toes onto the metal foot plates and close my eyes thinking this would be a lovely way to spend the afternoon.

The first pumpkin is set onto the stone steps and the last tomato lifted from the greenhouse. Jars of tomato and applesauce are tucked safely into the freezer. The pace begins to slow.

Our sheep graze in the field, lifting their noses from the clover to take in new scents. I stand, arms leaning on the top of the gate, and watch them. They are growing rounder as their fleece thickens. The leaves fall around them and the green of the pasture creates the canvas for the scene.

I carefully string small purple lights across the kitchen window and hang the jointed skeleton to clack back and forth in the breeze of the window. Standing on the ladder in the garage sifting through memories, I lift a leaf decoration signed “Josh” on the construction paper cuff. Hundreds of Halloween hangings of this in Josh’s bedroom window fly through my mind. I set it back into the box carefully. The bedroom now empty.

Small witches and ceramic pumpkins grin at me as if asking, “choose me, choose me!” I emotionally wobble at the top of the ladder, feeling slightly silly about my armful of decorations without a houseful of children. I step my way down with my treasures, hang them throughout the house and manage to feel glad.

Sitting at the bar in the kitchen I’m focused on the sound of raindrops plopping onto the leaves who, in turn, shudder and blow away from their mother. The ground is now covered by a mat of color making walking through them a sensory delight as they crunch. I look further up into the darkened forest across the road and note that there isn’t a moment I don’t see a leaf tumbling.

Time will pass and the trees will lose all leaves. Gathering the withering red and orange leaves in my hands makes me realize that even their beauty cannot save them. They arrived as small, helicopter-like seedlings and unfurled across the spring canvas with a yellow-green splash. Filled the branches, shaded the corner of our garden and danced in the wind of a summer storm: a full life.

Now is the end, there will be no return. The beauty that takes our breath as we drive is the dressing shroud of death. A final gift.

I will still sit in the window, feet in socks against the stove and watch the tree shiver in the November bleak. The remaining leaves rattle like old bones in the cold. I will feel the melancholy written about in so many poems; the emptiness and silence of all endings. I’ll feel the pull of hibernation and am still and more quiet as I descend. Discombobulated.

Those leaves will not return but, with the promise of spring, new ones will arrive.

Driving through the spectacular display I’m reminded to observe carefully, to treat important moments, important people, as if they will never come again.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul-

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops at all….

Emily Dickinson.