Through My Kitchen Window: white weeds in a vase.
Tomatoes on the windowsill, with a glass milk bottle.
White weeds and the last of the Montauk daisies.
Last week there were two deaths in my extended family/work environment, which left me
poised and waiting for the third. Not superstitious about anything else. Could walk under a ladder, make friends with a black cat or even rock an empty chair. But this one, I believe.
Debra lost her mother Wednesday. They were never close. Debra described some horrific abuse, when her mother took notice of her at all. She felt guilty about not feeling more grief.
Another friend lost her birth father, who'd been absent from her life until her late 30s. Her adoptive father raised her. She had a cordial relationship with her birth father, but it was too little, too late. The adoptive father was the one she called "Dad" and the one who gave her everything, books and clothes and
toys and pets, dance class and Scouts. Who taught her to drive. Who was a surrogate father to her son and whom she nursed in his last illness. Not. The. Same.
And the third came. Another family lost its matriarch, a godly woman who had lived a full and godly life and passed to the other side after her fourscore years and ten.
All to be mourned, but not in the same way.
I've been thinking about grief and loss and aging lately. Can't help it, that's what fall is all about.
As Shakespeare wrote "This time of year thou mayest in me behold, bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." "Bare ruined choirs." Oh, I like that, that Bard could turn a phrase.
And Jimmy Durante gave it a different spin in the classic "September Song" where "The days dwindle down to a precious few...September...November...And these few precious days, I'll spend with
you."
I thought of that sonnet and that song last Saturday, possibly the best day of the whole year, a splash of Indian summer (can we still call it that?) Warm but not hot, with a blazing sun and a light breeze that ruffled the turning leaves. They were shifting into red, yellow and gold but not "at peak" yet. Clouds were an early harbinger of a coming rainstorm and some trees were in shadow, only to have the next tree hit
with sun and turned into a shaft of fire. My daughter and I tooled around town doing errands, but the glory of the day elevated even those.
I finally left her at her Concord apartment and drove home, not the old way, not the back way, but the Old Back Way, past tidy country homes and tidier farmsteads bedecked with hardy mums, pumpkins and cornstalks on the mailbox. I crested a hill in Epsom and looked down on a field of corn, a pond and a stand of hardwoods, all ripplingly alive. I thought of what is to come, a gray and white world, death to all this beauty, "bare ruined choirs." Oh, how I wanted to hold on to it, to stop time. And to
bring back the people I'd lost.
Well, the older we get, the more we realize it doesn't work that way. And it shouldn't. This world is not our home.
But there's another aspect to "bare ruined choirs," and it's the one of harvest. Age is the time of
harvest, when everything we've learned and experienced and been comes into play, when we know what to do and how to do it and who to do it for. Time to gather in, time to reap what we've sown.
There will be winter. And there will be spring. There always is. And for now I'll make the most of autumn, grabbing each shaft of light as I help my friends grieve in whatever way they can grieve.
poised and waiting for the third. Not superstitious about anything else. Could walk under a ladder, make friends with a black cat or even rock an empty chair. But this one, I believe.
Debra lost her mother Wednesday. They were never close. Debra described some horrific abuse, when her mother took notice of her at all. She felt guilty about not feeling more grief.
Another friend lost her birth father, who'd been absent from her life until her late 30s. Her adoptive father raised her. She had a cordial relationship with her birth father, but it was too little, too late. The adoptive father was the one she called "Dad" and the one who gave her everything, books and clothes and
toys and pets, dance class and Scouts. Who taught her to drive. Who was a surrogate father to her son and whom she nursed in his last illness. Not. The. Same.
And the third came. Another family lost its matriarch, a godly woman who had lived a full and godly life and passed to the other side after her fourscore years and ten.
All to be mourned, but not in the same way.
I've been thinking about grief and loss and aging lately. Can't help it, that's what fall is all about.
As Shakespeare wrote "This time of year thou mayest in me behold, bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." "Bare ruined choirs." Oh, I like that, that Bard could turn a phrase.
And Jimmy Durante gave it a different spin in the classic "September Song" where "The days dwindle down to a precious few...September...November...And these few precious days, I'll spend with
you."
I thought of that sonnet and that song last Saturday, possibly the best day of the whole year, a splash of Indian summer (can we still call it that?) Warm but not hot, with a blazing sun and a light breeze that ruffled the turning leaves. They were shifting into red, yellow and gold but not "at peak" yet. Clouds were an early harbinger of a coming rainstorm and some trees were in shadow, only to have the next tree hit
with sun and turned into a shaft of fire. My daughter and I tooled around town doing errands, but the glory of the day elevated even those.
I finally left her at her Concord apartment and drove home, not the old way, not the back way, but the Old Back Way, past tidy country homes and tidier farmsteads bedecked with hardy mums, pumpkins and cornstalks on the mailbox. I crested a hill in Epsom and looked down on a field of corn, a pond and a stand of hardwoods, all ripplingly alive. I thought of what is to come, a gray and white world, death to all this beauty, "bare ruined choirs." Oh, how I wanted to hold on to it, to stop time. And to
bring back the people I'd lost.
Well, the older we get, the more we realize it doesn't work that way. And it shouldn't. This world is not our home.
But there's another aspect to "bare ruined choirs," and it's the one of harvest. Age is the time of
harvest, when everything we've learned and experienced and been comes into play, when we know what to do and how to do it and who to do it for. Time to gather in, time to reap what we've sown.
There will be winter. And there will be spring. There always is. And for now I'll make the most of autumn, grabbing each shaft of light as I help my friends grieve in whatever way they can grieve.
Outside the Peterborough Library, fall 2013.