The mist is thick on Main Street, the mist thicker on Porter where the houses are farther apart, the yards over grown between lots, several houses empty awaiting destruction, sale or tenants. Tall white oaks hundreds of years old, witness the moments drip one into the next amid scattered showers and thick fog.
Coyotes and foxes have taken to the brush on Porter as of late and tonight they scamper about, Indian Summer announced, but the nights have not the will to stay warm. And tonight my bones ache with the damp, the mist softens my vision and discourages visitors to this part of town.
It's wonderful. I listen to the haunts of Dead Can Dance, expecting an owl to sound or a hand to reach out of the past from beyond the veil and grab my flesh, to spook me back into believing that it is not simply this and then nothingness.
Whether 60 years, 60 days or 60 hours more, these last few weeks have been joy. Angst and fear largely at bay. Time with children, moments with nature, moments with myself, moments... life is a series of moments dripping by, bleeding one into the next, but so subtle, so steady that the bloodletting goes largely unnoticed until some event. Some event that "pulls the rug out from under us" as Chogyam Trungpa said - a funeral, a wedding, disturbing news completely unexpected. Some event that makes linear time seem silly, suspending the part of our mind that looks for walnuts and acorns to bury in the yard, should winter be long and hard. Whether 60 years or 60 days more, what joy without fear. May I keep fear at bay.
Indian Summer will surrender, autumn in turn, winter will be wonderful even if long and hard. Each season in its time, the cliches I write about, none of them fully memorable until that sight, that sound that smell of soil in air whether spring rotting leaves about to give birth, autumn crisp air, cool, but smoke filled, or cold, cold, biting breath of the after Christmas, none of these things are real until and only during the moment a season fully unfurls.
though we are not yet in the moment Ms. Millay describes below, I know it won't be long and I feel the leaves she speaks of cling (perhaps float) betwixt/between one season and the next, one moment and the last... thank you Ms. Millay.
The Oak-Leaves by Edna St. Vincent Millay from Wine From These Grapes (1934)
Yet in the end, defeated too, worn out and ready to fall,
Hangs from the drowsy tree with cramped and desperate stem
above the ditch the last leaf of all.
There is something to be learned, I guess, from looking at the
dead leaves under the living tree/
Something to be set to a lusty tune and learned and sung, it
well might be;
Something to be learned – though I was ever a ten-o’clock
scholar at this school-
Event perhaps by me.
But my heart goes out to the oak-leaves that are the last to sigh
“Enough,” and lose their hold;
They have boasted to the nudging frost and to the two-and-
thirty winds that they would never die,
Never even grown old.
(These are those russet leaves that cling
All winter, event into spring,
To the dormant bough, in the wood knee-deep in snow the
only coloured thing.)
