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.

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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.

Summer Will End Soon

Summer is winding down fast. I am starting to look at doing beginning of semester stuff (although it is a bit early) and my annual trip to New York State to do moulage is looming. I know my days of leisure are coming to an end.

In the meantime, however, I might as well enjoy. Writing and resting are the order of the day. (Except for today; I have a couple school-related items in the afternoon).

I wish I could store up rest. It doesn’t work that way, but at least I can store up the memory of rest and let it sustain me.

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.

Fall’s True Nature

I sit drinking coffee at the local Starbucks. The sky is still dark, lit with street lights and the festive bulbs of Starbucks’ patio. I don’t know what to write on this gloomy morning.

Yesterday it rained. The remnants sit in puddles in the parking lot. Autumn rains have a special place in my mind, indelibly printed there by a friend who took me out walking in the rain.

I have found Fall, not in the perfect blue of a sky, but in rain, in being drenched on a walk through a chilly night.

(In a dream: I walk through the storm. I am the storm. My voice is lost in thunder, and that is as it should be, because I will go back to the world of order where I am sixty and thought to be tame.)

It will be sunny today. It will be placid. I will smile at the sun and be mild, but I know my true nature. I know Fall’s true nature.

I’m Not Feeling Fall

Fall is my favorite time of year. So why does this fall hardly register with me?

The leaves are just beginning to turn, and there’s only two weeks till November (which I don’t consider fall). The temperature has just cooled down. There is no flamboyant maple tree standing against a cloudless azure sky. There’s no fireplace to curl up in front of. I had my annual pumpkin spice latte at the beginning of PSL season, which was way back in September. PSL season keeps coming earlier each year!

I’m too old for crushes. Crushes remind me of fall, and some of my best poems lay at the intersection of crushes and fall. I do not have that excitement in my life anymore, nor do I have that frustration. But it has diminished the brightness of fall somewhat.

Life hasn’t slowed down enough for me to appreciate the season. Between teaching a new class at the university, writing, and two moulage sessions, I fear things will never slow down. Maybe Christmas, I tell myself. But I want life to slow down sooner, if only for long enough that I can enjoy that flamboyant maple tree.

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.

The Beginning of the Semester Looms

Friday is zero hour, the beginning of semester meetings. I’ll sit through a couple days of meetings and then classes start.

This summer emptied out into the flattest vista of grey, and I curled up in it. I know this has been the most restful summer I’ve had, and that if I’m not rested up for the fall, I’ll never be.

This is NOT me.
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I still don’t know if I’m ready for the semester to start. I don’t know if I’m ready for the color and the cacophony of all the college students yet, the part of my life where I stand in front of a class and try to make the subject’s information real, the part where I unleash my odd sense of humor to help capture my students. I have forgotten that “professor” is one of my roles.

But this happens at the end of every summer, and the transition is made easier by the rituals of beginning: The all-employee picnic. The all-staff and faculty meetings. The greeting of new students. The cleaning of my office.

I’m ready. As ready as I’ll ever get. Bring on the cacophony.

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.

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.

I was born for autumn

I’m feeling in the mood for autumn. Meterological fall started August 31, but it hasn’t felt like fall lately given the 85+ degree weather, and astronomical fall won’t be for a couple more days.

Today, it’s raining outside, which puts me more in mind of fall. I like fall best because it is a season of introspection, of putting away the revelry of summer and taking stock of how many leaves I’ve seen fall in my life. The crisp mornings with scarlet and orange maple against the clear blue sky recall perfect moments, while the dark, icy rain reminds me of past travails.

I was born in autumn, born for autumn. It suits my dramatic side, the part of me who wants a black cape to walk through the whispering leaves. It suits the writer in me who wants to write of the dark corners of the psyche.

I will welcome autumn with a cup of cider or a glass of brandy, toasting the harvest and the darkening nights.