THE BEDIMMING

In the weightlessness of falling snow, Father Gomez stepped around piles of dirt to the front of a small crowd. He looked beyond the black headdresses and palettes of faded fall colors worn by the wild flowers that survived a cold spell. He made the sign of the cross, sprinkled holy water from a golden aspergillum and offered a few parting remarks: “Oh Lord, our symbols join our souls, linking faith and fate in a chain of time, so that what we do every day, how we think, and that for which we suffer reverberates into the space we call our lives.”

Everyone has left. I remain. Night falls and the Milky Way blankets stars in every direction, each a diamond I almost touch. Once in an October moon I’ll see a comet come out of nowhere, my heart will thump madly, my bones will shudder, paradoxes and illusions will course through my mind’s eye—my long way around telling you how I’m feeling in the quiet of this night— captivated, though not surprised by how you saw the intersections between our Universe and life, not like a scientist might, looking at every particle careening through space-time collisions that don’t make sense, but intoning the harmonies and force of words that silently irradiate our simple human emotions.

Now what? Now that you’re otherworldly my love. I wait to join you soon enough. For now, I am the providential one left in the aura of your being, made to feel wanted, needed, invited. Only on rare occasions in my life have I felt alone, you there in case I needed someone. How rarely I openly showed my gratitude. I hope this does not sound too confessional, too wistful.

Regardless where I am I’ll return here, not for winter, not for spring, or summer, but for autumn. Not simply for its beauty, unmatched in its color anywhere on earth, but for its rebirth. A rebirth tempered by anxiety.  Maybe because it foreshadows winter. Or, to echo your final words, “how quickly life and time moves through us invisibly, evidenced by life blossoming, watching Nature map a future where all we can do is partake and hope to escape the harshness of winter’s fate.” 

But aah autumn, even as time courses through my veins, even in the swirl of leaves liberated from their branches, even in the anticipation of that long cold hibernation, autumn makes me come alive.

I leave you now in the bedimming of fall days as I attend to the end of our harvest. As I account for the margins of what’s left, what lies ahead, I need to reckon what stock to feed, to slaughter, which geese to pluck or peddle.

Nigh the equinox, I will pick berries, hunt wild turkey. I will breathe bouquets of pies and jams, and watch braces of birds race south, before lamenting the asters wilting in the vase.

And when fall returns, next, I will return to await the weightlessness of falling snow and recall how we lived, what we lived for, and wonder if the harvest will come again, or learn that as with all life, it again will become one with the all-pervading night—.