It’s Fall, and Maybe I’m Making Progress.

I’ve remembered to write my blog today, about one day later, so maybe I am making progress.Time to remind myself that I am a writer, even if I feel little like one lately. I have a book I want to write, a Christmas romance novel, of which I have the basic outline laid out. I will start writing it on November 1st. Even if I don’t get those 50k words by December 1, I will make progress.

Photo by Kadri Vu00f5sumu00e4e on Pexels.com

Then there’s the other story, the one I don’t think is going well. Maybe I should look at it and see what it needs. A burial in a lead casket is a possibility unless I figure out how to make it a little less dark. Maybe it’s supposed to be that dark, but it’s ceased being fun to write.

Maybe I’ll feel like writing again, and it will become part of my life.

Autumn

It finally feels like fall, with morning temperatures in the 30s and the sunlight growing softer. It’s not a great year for autumn leaves, with most turning a dull yellow-green instead of fiery red. But I’m here for it, and looking forward to the coccooning that happens in the season.

I’m off today (Friday in the US) because of Walkout Day, a custom at the university during Homecoming week. Homecoming is a tradition in colleges and high schools surrounding an (American) football game, where there is a parade and homecoming floats and other activities. Alumni come back to enjoy the festivities, hence the name. It is the epitome of fall activities for small towns and small universities.

I hope to write today. Mostly organizing my notes, but that, too, is writing. I also may pick the picture for the cover of Kringle All the Way. We shall see how productive I feel.

Soggy Leaves

Now it feels like autumn. The trees are shaking off their leaves, and the drizzle makes them all soggy. It’s 73 out, the heater is on in my office and the dark skies outside make me feel even more wrapped in autumn.

The rainy days are almost the favorite part of my autumn. A loud October thunderstorm is my favorite. Maybe I’m a drama queen (I’m not anymore, but I miss drama) but there’s something about thunderstorms. They make for atmospheric scenes in books. I don’t know why I’ve not written a cathartic lovers’ argument in a thunderstorm. I need to remedy this.

November is in a week, and I am hearing rumors of snow in the forecast. Thanksgiving will be here before I know it. But I got my October rain.

In the autumn

In the fall, I feel a twinge of sadness.

I feel it because I’m older, almost sixty. I don’t feel I grew older — I suddenly found myself this old, an unfathomable leap I seem to have made. Forty wasn’t old, nor was fifty. Sixty is old.

They, the faceless mass of bearers of pithy statements, say that age is just a number. Yes, it is. But it’s also a path strewn with memories that go way back, and the tendency to pull them out and examine them: “I remember when there was still a soda fountain in my hometown.” Now I never see soda fountains, but energy drinks are everywhere.

The fall is associated with aging, because it’s the gateway to the winter of the year, in which the year dies. I don’t plan on dying soon, but I know that I’m closer to it than when I was twenty. And each falling leaf reminds me I have seen many, many autumns.

Perhaps I can learn to be old and young at the same time. There are leaf piles to jump into, puddles to stomp. Inevitably, I will grow old, but I don’t need to hold back on joy.

Everyday vs Writerly Stuff

It’s snowing thirty miles north of us.

Yes, it’s only halfway through the month of October, and southern Iowa is getting snow. We’re just getting the greyest skies imaginable, with a bit of fog and a touch of wind. I’m ready for snow — heck, I’m ready for anything with my cup of ginger tea and my cranking weather radio because I’m a Midwesterner.

I want to write about more than the weather, however. Because this blog is often a warm-up for my other writing (such as the novel I’ll be writing for NaNo), I tend to write off the top of my head, which involves:

1) Weather

2) Setting

3) Where my head is at

4) What I’ve been up to

Maybe that’s okay. I’ve put up a writers’ blog where I’m talking about more writerly stuff at lleachie.wixsite.com/laurenleachsteffens . I don’t write as often there because I don’t write writerly things every day. I will be mobilizing that as my writers’ website very soon.

But I should tell you that The Kringle Conspiracy is available for pre-order on Amazon. Type in my full name, and you should be able to find it!

Deep October

So, October’s a bit warm right now. We sat on the patio at the local steakhouse for dinner last night and it was only a tiny bit cold in my shirt sleeves. Even when the cold front comes in Thursday, our highs are going to be in the seventies.

Even though the days are gloriously warm even as the leaves turn, I strangely look forward to the snap in the air, the frost, the chill rain under black skies. Especially the rain.

I had a cloak, a heavy and billowy thing of burgundy tweed with a lining of velour. There was nothing better than that for an autumn evening, especially if it was misting. The cloak had a bonnet hood with it to keep off the rain. I still have the cloak, but it desperately needs cleaning from hanging on a basement rack and there’s rips in the lining. And I feel a little self-conscious wearing it now, to be honest. It’s a quite spectacular cloak.

I look forward to the withered grasses, the brown, sere roadsides, the grey skies. I await the chill evenings, the dreary rainstorms, the crisp orange and brown mornings, the touch of frost. Summer has been with us too long.

The Power of Small Rituals

Sunday morning, and our Sunday ritual once again — classical music and coffee. No newspaper, although we pull up the news on the Internet. Two of our cats linger downstairs — the big Chuckie with the tiny meow, and the loud and insistent calico Girly-Girl. Me-Me and Chloe the kitten are scrapping it out upstairs.

We don’t play anything but classical music till afternoon, and then we’re likely to play jazz. (Except today, when we will break the “no carols till Thanksgiving rule and play my playlist for Kringle in the Night through for tweaks.)

Meanwhile, the scent in the room is Silver Birch, a very autumnal scent. Outside, there’s one maple tree with leaves starting to turn red to remind us that the seasons do pass even when we’re too busy to look.

I’m thinking about my ritual to commemorate my book being published. I have a Moonman C1 Christmas Edition fountain pen coming in the mail, hopefully before the first of November. I will fill it with red ink and use it for Christmas things.

Rituals, as I have said before, are important. They help mark the seasons, the days, the milestones. They help commemorate the everyday and the phenomenal. They help with closure and with focus, with devotion and with loss. Don’t ignore the power of small rituals.

A Snippet of Autumn

Yesterday afternoon, I looked out the window to see a maple tree striped with fire.

Astronomical autumn came quickly. Soon, leaves will tumble and be brushed into piles smelling of dust and bark. Evenings will grow dark sooner, and the motif will change from flip-flops and seashells to pumpkins and dried corn stalks. It’s time to reap the harvest and prepare to settle in our homes to wait for winter. Our schedules will not allow us that rest, but our bodies long for it as the days get shorter.

I will feel the temperatures drop, and I will wear a jacket against the chill. I will drink hot, smoky tea with cream to chase away the cold. I will feel the change of the seasons, even though my summer was spent inside and working due to the COVID-19. I will wish for a huge leaf pile, one that will accommodate my big, old bones.

Soon, the snap in the air says. Soon.

Snow. In October.

Snow. In October.

We had flurries last night here in northwest Missouri, just enough to notice, not enough to coat the ground. I wouldn’t complain about that, but we are getting a freezing rain/snow of up to three inches precipitation tomorrow, just in time for Halloween.

Between the unseasonably warm weather and the snow, we have had about two weeks of autumn. I demand an explanation.

There’s an old adage that cautions against complaining about the weather, but snow. In October. I think this is an extenuating circumstance.

The snow will melt, leaving our lawns drab, sodden leaves and dun grasses. Because this is Missouri, home of the four seasons in one day, we may even see temperatures in the sixties — or, who knows, the seventies — before December. But the damage has been done. November will be a child of winter, not autumn, and we will be tired of snow before the year is out.

Halloween is Thursday, right smack in the middle of the snow. Maybe I should go as a snowman.

Another Homecoming and the Words that Come With It

The leaves have finally turned, orange and red and brown, dazzling the campus for Homecoming. I remain convinced that Homecoming is the remnant of a pagan ritual that captures parts of the harvest festivals and part of the sacrificial king (in the guise of a football game.) This would make pumpkin spice latte a sacrament, and I’m not sure I want to go that far.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought this way, of the seasons of the year yielding a mythology we live by. I had no reason not to think this way, given that both Quakers and Episcopalians can skew romantic about the seasons, and rare individuals of each even call themselves pagan. In fact, the liturgical Christian traditions follow a liturgy of seasons, and mystical Christian traditions offer a glimpse of the movement of the year as well.

When I was younger, I was what I called a kitchen witch, making my own rituals in solitude, following the seasons of the year. This faded with my years as a professor, even though my religious life didn’t give me the hands-on relationship with life that I wanted. (Correction: Membership in the Religious Society of Friends did, but I’ve been 90 miles from Meeting for 21 years. The Episcopal Church put me too far from the feeling of sacredness.)

We need our rituals, whether dressed Wiccan or pagan or Christian (or one of the many other religions we profess). Those who have stripped ourselves of rituals because they’re “pagan” lose our moorings to the seasons and to the earth. Those without rituals that speak to them frantically try to rip rituals from others by brandishing the word “Satanic”, or create a mockery of ritual that worships hatred, bullying, and totalitarianism (MAGA rallies, I’m looking at you.)

I think about what Autumn says to me — golden and bittersweet, rejoicing at the leaves and wrapping up against the chill. Saying goodbye (Les’s death still resonates) and hugging the last of harvest to my arms. Snuggling with cats — always snuggling with cats.

Hoping it makes for good poetry now that I vow not letting work become everything.