first day of fall

Come down to the back patio,” my neighbor Debbie texts.

“30 minutes,” I reply.  “Am on the phone.”

“I’ll wait,” she types back.  “Important.”

I finish chatting with my son and walk out the kitchen door.  Although it’s only four, the sun is low and the day feels all but over.  The trees are dappling, as if dappling is what the trees are here to do. For the first time, I see a scattering of leaves on the ground, portent of the carpet to come.

Ferns that were lush and green on Saturday morning have turned to bronze by this Monday afternoon. The air, though warm and still, seems to breathe the end of summer, each breeze an exhalation of endings.  There’s no single word to describe my feelings on this first day of fall, a sense of loss tangled with gratitude, of sadness stirred with wonder, awareness, longing, hope.

Although my friend is waiting for me, I pause in the garden to look around. I’ve been gone only two days yet everything seems different — softer, quieter, the urgency of growing and blooming slowed now in the golden light of an autumn afternoon.  A monarch flutters past, landing on a swaying spire of purple-top verbena.  Suddenly I realize the air is alive with butterflies, wobbling silently amongst the flowers with their delicate stained-glass wings, touching briefly down on zinnias, sedum, and their beloved verbena, drinking deeply from each chosen blossom as if offering benedictions.

Always at this time of year, as the days grow shorter and the heart-shaped morning glory leaves collapse upon themselves, my own heart grows heavy with the weight of memory.  Two dear friends began their slow exits from the world in Septembers past, as if the change of seasons was the cue their own bodies had been waiting for.  Come September, I remember the bittersweet final days I spent with each of them, how each in her own quiet, determined way undertook the work of letting go, allowing life to give way inexorably to death.

Now, here, older than either of them ever were, I think of all they’ve missed.  And, too, I marvel at the way life goes on. I did not suspect, twenty autumns ago as Lisa and I ran together, panting and talking and laughing as we urged each other to push for one more mile, that I would grow old without her.  I couldn’t have imagined, as Diane and Carol and I planned the menu for a festive Harvest Dinner one long-ago September afternoon, that our threesome would become two, or that in 2019, nine years after her death, Carol and I would carry on our friend’s legacy by rising in the dark on a fall Sunday to join a dedicated group of fellow walkers on the Jimmy Fund Marathon to raise money for ovarian cancer research.

As we stood side by side on Diane’s front porch after the walk Sunday afternoon, surrounded by friends and family, champagne glasses raised in remembrance of our friend, I was struck by both the sadness and the rightness of things.  Life goes on.

And I am humbled by all of it. Perhaps growing up, growing old, even growing wise simply means finally, fully appreciating the miracle of being here.  Maybe it also means recognizing, at last, that the vast, eternal rhythms at work in the world are holy, mysterious, and forever beyond my own limited understanding.

How to explain the alchemy by which a flat, tan seed tucked into the dirt last spring can produce by September half a dozen miniature butternut squash hidden under veiny, dinner-plates sized leaves? (I crouch to do my daily head-count, as if checking on a litter of kittens, and there they are, their perfect, tawny skins as smooth as silk.)

How to account for the miracle by which the nasturtium vine, product of its own shriveled seed, rambles now, sprawling with blossoms, across twenty feet of stone wall?

What can I do but bow my head before the height of a sun-flower, or offer prayers of thanks for the taste of a peach?

And isn’t it my own foolish loss if I fail to gaze in awe at the many-petaled zinnia, the industry of the bee, the color of the leaf at my feet?

As a child, I took all this for granted, as if the world existed for my use and pleasure.  Now, a week shy of sixty-one, the existence of every living thing fills me with amazement.

Last fall, Debbie and I scattered hundreds of milkweed seeds in the part of the field we’ve begun to leave unmowed.  Over the last few years, left mostly to its own devices and with just a little help from us, this tangled patch has slowly transformed itself into a wild mix of goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and black-eyed Susans, all exuberantly self-sowing and threading themselves through the grasses.  The milkweed took root and grew and thrived.  The first monarch appeared in June, surprising us with its early arrival. And then at dusk one night a few weeks later we stood and watched as an army of striped caterpillars hungrily feasted on milkweed leaves.

When my two sons were little, a September afternoon meant butterflies to watch.  Just twenty years ago there were estimated to be over a billion monarchs in North America alone.  Now, thanks to Round-Up, the loss of habitat, the effects of climate change on their wintering grounds in Mexico, and the disappearance of milkweed from the roadsides and fields of the land, the butterflies are at risk of extinction.  Scientists estimate a population slashed to 93 million, with most of those survivors in the Northeast. It’s a small thing we’re doing here, growing milkweed for the monarchs, but there’s nothing that’s given us more joy this summer than seeing the success of our  crop and the return of the butterflies. Plant milkweed, it seems, and they will come – at least for this year.

There’s much in this world beyond my ken and out of my control.  The devastating reports arrive weekly it seems — the loss of birds, of bees, the damage to the oceans, the Trump administration’s aggressive roll-back of environmental protections that have been in place for years. And I’ve given in often of late to feelings of helplessness, grief, and anger. But it is also in our human nature to lean toward hope. And so, as I pay ever closer attention to subtle changes in my own backyard, I remind myself to also keep watch for goodness. It exists.

On this unseasonably warm first day of fall, 2019, a sixteen-year-old girl eloquently addressed the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit, demanding that world leaders begin to deal with climate change as the emergency we and they all know it to be.

On this first day of fall, the chorus of voices insisting that our morally corrupt president be impeached grew stronger and louder.

On this first day of fall, Team Diane in its ninth year added up our funds and donated over $28,000 to Dr. Ursula Matulonis and her crew of researchers at Dana Farber.

On this first day of fall, my son Henry, who has been struggling in his first year of college teaching, called to report that he’d had a pretty good day.

On this first day of fall, I am standing in my garden as the sun goes down, remembering dear friends who are gone and counting monarch butterflies. There are six, nine, more.

At last, a little late, I make my way down to the back patio where Debbie has been waiting for me.

“Sit down,” she instructs, “and tell me what you see.”

I see a bluebird perching on the birdhouse, a flock of sparrows lifting and settling in the tall grass, a hawk floating on a current far above our heads, the mountains turning violet in the reflected light of dusk.

“Look closer,” Debbie says, and I do.

There, right in front of my chair, dangling from the rim of our metal fire pit, is a tiny celadon chrysalis, perfect as a jewel.  On this first day of fall, life goes on. Blessed are we.

ONE OR TWO THINGS”

1

Don’t bother me.

I’ve just

been born.

2

The butterfly’s loping flight

carries it through the country of the leaves

delicately, and well enough to get it

where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping

here and there to fuzzle the damp throats

of flowers and the black mud; up

and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly

lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk

of some ordinary flower.

3

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things, I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice,

crow voice,

frog voice; now,

he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever,

4

which has nevertheless always been,

like a sharp iron hoof,

at the center of my mind.

5

One or two things are all you need

to travel over the blue pond, over the deep

roughage of the trees and through the stiff

flowers of lightning– some deep

memory of pleasure, some cutting

knowledge of pain.

6

But to lift the hoof!

For that you need an idea.

7

For years and years I struggled

just to love my life.  And then

the butterfly

rose, weightless, in the wind.

“Don’t love your life

too much,” it said,

and vanished into the world.

~  Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems:  Volume One