I see my breath this morning, the first real sign of the
change of season two or three weeks expired.
Dr. Mollenkott once said I would change my mind about loving
autumn when I reached her age and came to realize just what it signified in our
lives.
She was wrong. I still love fall in a way I can never love
spring, even though I crave the coming of warmth after so long living with the
deep freeze, just as I craved it that winter in 1977 when I felt lost and
depressed, and wandered out into the last winter storm and saw the rain
freezing on the tips of branches, and saw the first subtle signs of a budding
new season.
Fall always means change to me, always suggests that what we
live with now won’t last, good or bad, part of that All Things Must Pass,
George Harrison sang about so long ago, a slow steady change from intense heat,
usually coming with a week or so of desperately needed rain, washing away the
dust from our lives, before carrying us off into the chill.
I see my breath in the air and realize I am still alive, and
kicking, and ready to face the next winter of my life, even if as with so many
of my family members at my age, it could be my last.
Someone stopped me on the train a few days ago, noticing me
when I was scribbling in my notebooks, asking me if I was a writer, and what it
is I write about, and how I was transcribing old type written pages, and I
could only answer that I was preserving people’s lives, the description I gave
far too inadequate to describe the almost religious experience.
“This is what I do,” I said, not expecting this woman or
anybody else to fully understand that desperate need to keep alive memories,
some of which aren’t even my own, clinging to the edge of autumn for as long as
possible before giving up and accepting what is inevitable.
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