Pea and I took a walk one afternoon this week in what looks to be the last nice day around these parts for quite some time. This has been a stellar fall--straight from the textbooks, exactly what fall is always cracked up to be: mornings knee-deep in cushion-y fog; a slow burn of sunlight melting frost and showing up the smoke over chimneys; nights cold and dark and clear, with the bite and snap of winter but a sly promise to wait for a bit. We walked through two of our favorite neighborhoods, trying to breathe in and save for later these last bits of my favorite season. There were yellow and orange leaves covering some of the sidewalks and I purposefully plowed the stroller through their carpets. Over the scatterings of empty walnut shells left by squirrels. Over the poisonous-looking berries fallen onto the street and opened by car tires, red juice leaking into drifts of pine needles and loose gravel. This particular afternoon the sun hadn't made as much of an effort and by three o'clock or so it had retreated, back behind the cotton-batting clouds.
We walked and walked, me thinking and praying and trying to be aware of all this color and beauty and change and Pea sleeping, tucked inside the stroller in a coat and blanket and her first pair of mittens. She slept deeply--the uneven sidewalk and general debris seeming to intensify her slumber. So many emotions and fragments of memories began to come back, pulling at the edges of my thoughts and bringing scenes and moments before my eyes in tiny glimpses of startling color. And then nothing. Vanishing like the plumes of smoke hanging over the yards of the brick ranches and white colonials. Now I can hardly remember any of them, and it's only been a few days, but I do remember some of the fleeting thoughts that came with them. Thoughts about fall, October, November and the things that can take me back to this season in an instant.
To me, fall is Miles Davis' album, "Kind of Blue". The whole entire thing. Partly because it played in the background when a long-ago friend and I drove to Seattle. It was the end of fall and Seattle was of course a good bit colder than Portland, but my old, blue Ford Escort hatchback stayed nice and toasty and we talked and talked and Miles played and played, the whole way there and the whole way back. I could hum entire chunks of it by the time we returned to Portland, and if memory serves me correctly we were only there for twenty-four hours. That friend is no longer in my life, through so many odd and confusing circumstances that now, some seven years later, I can't clearly recall the beginning of the end, much less the end.
Fall is classical music on the radio on overcast Saturday mornings in Kentucky. I was eight, nine, and even twelve years old and I wanted to take ballet so badly I would cry about it under the covers at night. There are many reasons why I couldn't, and didn't, but mostly it's because we didn't have money for it, and anyway, I was terrified of giving my father one more arena in which to prove that I wasn't perfect and never would be. Growing up, I always felt especially alone this time of year--but for some reason I also felt especially hopeful. Somehow every fall, when faced with such scandalous beauty of leaves and light, and frost so thick it was like snow had fallen in the night, I knew that one day he would no longer be able to keep my heart his prisoner. I knew I would find a way out. When he died it was summer, and the first season I had in my entire life without him was, fittingly, fall. Corinne Bailey Rae's song, "Choux Pastry Heart", brings up some of the same thoughts and memories. Not sure why, but it is sweet and sad and talks about loss.
A newer memory occurred in early November of last year. It was evening, the curtains were drawn, the fire was lit, and I was lying on our mushroom-colored velvet couch listening to Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. I was warm and safe and out of the cold, and behind me, in the kitchen making supper, was a man who loved me and who's love, in many ways, had saved my life. As I lay there, drowsily attempting to read, a tiny, tiny baby of only four months or so gestation began to kick madly away inside of me. Little bubbly movements that increased when the music volume increased and lessened when the music quieted. That little, kicking creature is at this very moment snapped into fleecy, white ducky pajamas, and is lying on the other side of this wall, fast asleep in her crib. Warmth and safety, love and dreams. Incredible, breath-taking grace has taken me from an anxious, frightened childhood to a deeply happy and (mostly) calm adulthood.
I guess what this season means to me, more than anything, is change. Tangible, smoke-sharp change. Things falling off and dying and breaking open to show their true insides. Things burrowing deep underneath a slowly freezing world--burrowing deep enough to live again. One day. At the same time that my childhood world was turning on end, the same time that my father was sexually abusing me and that my mother was completely disconnecting, the same time that lies were told me about God and family, at the same time that my world was dark and cold and empty, a steely hope began to burrow its way deep into my soul, past the lies and shame, past the fear. Fall, more than anything, reminds of this: that all this flaming color just moments from death is only the outside thing, the shell....the shadow, the pretend. What is true and what is real always stays alive. Even if it has to go underground for a while.
Now it is raining--big blasts of cold rain are pouring down the office window and splattering against the walls of this house. Change keeps coming.
