Autumn

Last night a prediction of a hard freeze. Only midwesterns get that phrase. It freezes a lot before the frost is on the windowpane. Or, enough frost to kill the garden plants. So Ron, the one imparting the sad tidings to me, went outside to help me cover the plants. Yes, cover them. To keep the frost off of them. Otherwise they would die. Cracks me up, I don't want them to die. I am sick of canning tomatoes, I have let some weeds grow tall and too healthy because I am sick of gardening. BUT, then I am out covering them up so they can maybe eek out life for two or three more weeks.
Those who see life as the seasons, you know, spring, summer and fall of our lives....Do you see it? I am fighting winter. All older people fight winter. When I was young, I just let those plants die. I always felt there were enough done up. Now, I am fighting it all. The losses, the ugly look of dying plants, the brittle leftovers that no one wants.
It was a hard freeze So hard I had to scrape the windshield this morning. I was afraid and didn't look at my garden until I returned home tonight. It survive!! Even the sick plants I hadn't covered due to not enough sheets and blankets. Tomorrow morning I will head out and uncover them. (Light freeze warning for tonight) They will live and bear the joyful splendors I have come to know well. I hope I do the same as I enter the winter of my life.

aniversaries

Since I was the one who filed for divorce, why does that date still haunt me?
The loss of the dream? The collapse of hearts? The lack of faith I have in my own common sense? I think of how I met a man/boy that made me thrill to the core. Who thought I was lovely. No small thing. 20 years of marriage - my mom used to say, "Patty was happily married for 20 years, Steve about 18." But that wedding date and the promises of bliss...alas and alack!! This year I was made aware again of how that date sticks to my subconscious like cigarette smoke to the walls. Unobtrusively but destructively always there, gathering in dank and dangerousness. It always hits sometime during the day...an unpleasant sense of having left something important out. Then the gradual realization that it isn't important anymore, it is just out. Done. This year, and honestly, I know I knew it, the man I love with was still trying to get hold of his son. It was the son's birthday. I thought, what an irony. It is son's birthday on my former aniversary (Ironic because his daughter got married last Nov. on my birthday.) So I knew there was this birthday on my dreaded date but this time, as I responded by a tilt of my head in what I have come to know as the dead fish pose, I questioned how one date could be so extreme? The date is full of the anticipation I had for a long joyous wedded life. The dismay as the date was able to remain standing long after the marriage was destroyed. It also holds the crazy serenity of new parents on the birth of their first child, and stereotypically correctly, a son. How much can a day hold, I wonder on days like Pearl Harbor Day, Fourth of July, my aniversary? Answer: more than a heart can hold.