Solstice

And so it comes, the shortest day of the year.  The sun rises weakly and sets low in  the southern sky, arching to its puny zenith. Winter is firmly fixed and will remain for many weeks. Yet oddly we've had our sharpest cold and thawing has begun! Ice flows melt in the river, steaming in the sudden warmth.  The yard is muddy, the sidewalks are sweating and I expect crocuses before Christmas!!

Those like me who want to live in a picture postcard will grieve, but every year brings its own.  It is the cumulative that paints the perfect scene. Sentimental memories are arranged on the mantel, baked into every cookie and cheese straw, tied around each package.  I commune with Nanny and Momma as I make the fudge, channeling their Christmas romance.

How will this holiday be recorded, adding to my living history? I imagine it will be just so: family, food, dogs, laughter, wrappings, tears, joy and sadness, cigars, glasses raised, music, love, frustration, phone calls, exhaustion, regret, pleasure, sighing.....

This dark day, briefly illum'ed by a tremulous star, waiting for light to return. So like this darkened world that trembles in expectation, waiting for Light, for it's Star to come again.  Come, Lord Jesus. 

November Rose

The trees have turned very little.  The red maple in our front yard is the exception. It has been changing colors slowly over the last few weeks, hanging on tenaciously despite windy fronts and wide swings in temperatures. Today it is melting into deepest ruby red, preparing to finally deliver it's bounty of leaves to the waiting ivy below. Look out over this part of Missouri from any high vantage point you will see greens and grey and browns and even some bare branches.

Some people say it's because of the dry autumn. Lord knows we have had a terribly dry October, but the rest of the summer had plenty of rain. My frustration is this: every year in New England they have marvelous displays of color. Do you mean to tell me that they never have dry years? Years dry enough to cause eighty percent of the foliage to NOT change colors? I don't think so.

Every year it's something. Last year it was too warm. This year it is too dry. I am not going to begin to understand this and folks who know me know that I drive myself to distraction "trying to figure things out."

I planted a flower garden early last summer just below the windows of my parents' apartment. I planted impatiens and roses and zinnias and blue ageratum, hoping my parents would come sit on the little patio and enjoy the flowers of a mild summer evening. To my knowledge, they've never visited the little flower garden, but they do look down upon it and approve. I have regularly brought in cut flowers for Momma to enjoy and this week I brought her the last two roses of the year. The weather man predicts the temperature to plummet into the lower twenties tonight.  That will end the flowers and the russet leaves and the persistently green ones as well.

Tomorrow it will look like winter.  And it will be winter soon enough.  Short gray days with gray skies and gray tree trunks and gray grass.  Windows shuttered tightly against the gray winds.  I begin to think of snowflakes instead of roses.  Winter. A quieter time, smaller, more confining.  Layers of clothing, walls and windows.  Enclosed.  Close.  One petal falls from the November rose, landing in a beam of weak wintery sunlight slanting on the breakfast table.

Brush Strokes

The view from the kitchen window is a canopy of fragile autumn light. The redbud closest to the house is a deep vibrant yellow. The leaves of the ash are yellow underneath but garnet on top. The red maple that towers over both is in transition from deepest green to fiery red. I looked out yesterday as the wind ripped away a hundred ash leaves and tossed them to the sky. I wanted to cry out at the wastefulness, to slow down the destruction, so that I might savor it at my leisure. It's as if some marvelous painter, after a frenzy of beautiful bravura brush strokes, threw down his brush and tore the canvas to shreds and let the wind carry it all away. Nature says, I've done my work for the season, I've adorned my trees in their finest, for my own glory, and now I am tired and will take my rest.

I have never comprehended the radiance that emanates from the dying leaves. It appears not to be reflected light but generated from within. Particularly on a cloudy day, each leaf shines brilliantly as if a tiny solar system cycled around it, irradiated by its golden glow. I do not want to let it pass without celebration, this fleeting moment between autumn and winter, seconds before the wind ravishes the leaves and tosses them carelessly to the sky. I want to hold onto the leaves, pressing them into my mind, painting them with thick chiaroscuro strokes of pure pigment. If I turn my head, if I look away in busiedness, I may miss it, this dying of a million suns.

Nothing is wasted by the loss of leaves, but rather they are speedily dispatched to be shared by the ecosystem of which they are an integral part. I know all about the leaves turning to sugar and falling to the ground to be used as compost to nourish the soil. I'm a gardener, after all, and comprehend the overall genius of the master plan. But nothing makes me more sentimental.

I do not willingly allow the past to be flung away in gusts of time. I yearn for past autumns when my children walked down the street carpeted with leaves, backpacks flung over a shoulder, books curled in an arm. The light is suspended in tiny fluttering suns above them, around them, and below. Yet in my memory they are always walking away from me, always going towards some thing, some where, some one else. It is a selfish longing, to hold onto leaves, children, the past. They go the way they are meant to by the master gardener. Only in trying to grasp the present do we lose it. Let them be swept up into the azure sky, trusting that they will flutter down gently to be used mightily in another time and place.

Bags of Wind

The plastic bag is still tangled in the branches of the plum tree outside the kitchen window. It just flaps all day long, stuck on a bare, winter twig. A bit of man-made detritus skewered on a dead tree tip. It reminds me of the film shown at the art center last year. It consisted solely of a similar bag stuck in a similar tree top. Nothing happened. It just flapped in the wind endlessly, the film looping continuously. No beginning or ending. Futile. Barren. Ugly.

My bag will never be able to untangle itself. I'll have to get the ladder and clip it off. It affronts my sensibilities. I can't leave it there until it dries and tatters and eventually becomes concealed by the leaves.

Makes me wonder why I care. "What does it matter?" Is this a metaphor for the ugliness that has a tangle-hold on the world, that will never free itself, but must be cut out? Who defines what is beautiful or ugly? Or does it just offend my sense of orderliness and control over my immediate environment?

Maybe it is just my way of trying to bring order into the chaos of the cosmos, something I strive to do everyday with my art. I don't think bags blowing in the wind is art, nor do I think bags of wind can define what is art. (Yes, I do mean the double entendre.)

I'll get out there pretty soon and cut it down.