Waiting for AutumnAll our lives we wait. We wait for good things to happen, we wait for bad things to pass. We wait for the telephone to ring, for the mail to come, for payday to arrive and for the long, long sleepless nights waiting for those we love to recover from illness. We look back on the waiting, the time that was frozen in our minds with the clock still moving forward when we wished with all our might that time would simply standstill.
In summer, we wait for fall, in the fall we wait for winter and winter pushes us towards the inevitable "I can't wait for spring." With a finite number of days, weeks, months and years that comprise our lifetimes we do so little to live in the moment, choosing only to be pushed forward to the "next."
I like the fall. I like the smell of the last lawn cut and the mowers put up for another season, I like the smell of those artificial logs that I guiltily burnt by the case in Anchorage - thank you Sandy; I like the chill in the air and the way that the sun turns everything golden in alpenglow here, as in Alaska - at the end of the day. Here in the mid-west there are new sounds to get used to. The sound of the national anthem played before every baseball game in summer has given way to the sound of the drum and buglers before football. I hear the sound of the barges making their way on the Saint Claire River, passing under the Blue Water Bridge, and into Lake Huron. Fall seems to make these sounds clearer than summer sounds. Passing over the bridge into Canada the view of the lake with sailboats on the weekends and freighters passing pleasure boats reminds me, always, why I picked Port Huron to settle in. Downtown the shops are closing and the quaintness of the main street is slipping away, given over to strip malls and other less appealing structures in order to survive. Still - the buildings themselves lend hope that they will be revived once again.
Living "outside" or as the Alaskans say "in the lower 48" for the past 13 years I have forgotten that time did not stop, that cities - like people - grow older. The young leave the small towns, the farms, and the sparsely populated towns for something bigger, something better or something more exciting. Then, years later they return - sometimes to raise families in an environment less frightening than the big cities, sometimes to recover from wounds too deep to be healed anywhere but home. A new generation is moving back to the small towns for reasons other than those before them. They come to small towns in order to live instead of just getting by. The price of living somewhere else has taken its toll financially and it is no longer feasible to live there anymore. Divorce, separation, loss of job, death, all nudging them out of their homes, their lives and their towns to somewhere they can afford to live, to eat, to breathe again.
In the end, I think that we are where we are because we are meant to be there. Circumstances good and bad have caused us to relocate and when we pass from grieving the loss of one part of our lives to opening our eyes to the next adventure make us who we are. There is good and bad in everything we experience. But when we stop and ask "what am I supposed to learn from that, and what am I supposed to see" then life will continue its path chosen some say by us, and we become more aware of who we are and what this short time on this earthly planet is all about.
My neighbor has a tree that changes from the Merlot colored leaves of spring and summer into a brilliant red, coppery and vivid in the fall. It makes me think that fall is not about dying and loss - it is about grabbing our attention, halting us in our tracks, and stopping to be "in the moment" without thoughts of mortgages, bills, appointments and deadlines. We stop, we take in a deep breath and we breathe in that m
oment knowing that something much larger than ourselves keeps everything in its proper order. We relinquish for just a moment all the troubles and distractions of our everyday life and smile. "Fall."
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