Now that I've been home for (almost!) a week in my snug little cottage with the bricks, and river stones, and lanterns interposed between me and the chilly, Autumn rain, and now that my old body is beginning to remember what time zone and what season this is, I am almost incandescent with joy. Ever since I was a teenager (maybe before!), I have adored Autumn. And I adore it still, and I am addled enough to imagine that the feeling is mutual.
What I love best about it, at least now -- at this stage of the amazingly fun game that I showed up here playing -- what I love best about it now, is the incredible sense of deshabille in the garden. There's no point going out and spending an evening or a weekend "straightening" and "fixing." The garden just now is a familiar lover, the kind willing to let her breasts spill out of her bathrobe while eating Chinese take-out w/ chopsticks on her side in bed, the kind who will go into the bathroom while her lover is shaving and pee, the kind who will go for a walk with her lover's friends with her hair pulled back in a pony tail and her face free of make-up. (The other morning, I sat at a stoplight and watched a young woman jog past me with full make-up (eye-liner! you know that's going to run!) and color-coordinated jogging clothes. All that I could think was: "Your life is going to get a whole lot easier for you as you age. So mote it be.")
I sit here and watch the hostas turn yellow and die, I watch the toad lilies bloom, I watch the Japanese Maple leaves turn copper as a mere precursor to the brilliant scarlet that they will eventually turn, I email back and forth w/ Landscape Guy about what to plant this Autumn, and I love being the Witch of This Place even more than I can ever begin to say. There's an old saying in "Chop Wood, Carry Water," that goes: "I have always known that I would come this way. But, yesterday, I did not know that it would be today." It's actually wrong. I have always known that it would be today.
May your Autumn be a mess of messy age and may all of your ancestors show up and bother you. So mote it be.
Picture found here.
