The Cusp of Autumn

The air maintains a crisp quality, breezes are cool and speak of the winter to come. The sun seems to have taken a step back from us, no longer casting as warm a glow as she was just a month ago. No, now is the time for her to retreat, for her to retire, so that we can rest for awhile in the embrace of winter.

Outside the visitors are less numerous, their disruptions less frequent as I go about my day off. The window stays open, and their voices, if they do travel alongside my house, are increasingly foreign in nature. Which is just fine by me. For once I am glad not to understand them: ignorance is bliss.

With autumn, as with spring, comes the need to clean. Papers are sorted into three piles: keep, trash, and kindling. Soon we will be starting fires in the stove again, and I have no intention of running out of fire-starters. Everything off the floor! It's time to run the vacuum, shake out the rug, suck up the cobwebs from the floor runners. Make that four categories of paper: anything remotely interesting gets poster-puddied onto the wall. I've got a growing gallery there: postcards, phone numbers, Mom's little doodles on the back of which she sent me her most recent letter, a map of Sequoia and Kings Canyon with the Big Arroyo Trail highlighted. Someone I look forward to seeing again is out there right now. If patience pays off, they will be here soon enough. Feathers are collected from the corners they've blown to, tied down onto a length of hemp, strung from a push-pin in the wall along with my old dream catcher. Not the one I got free with a coupon at some gift shop in New Mexico, but the one that I made my first season here. Where I hiked up the canyon alongside Geiger and cut a willow, soaked it, debarked it, and fastened it into a circle with my trusty hemp, weaving the web from whose center I would dangle another hemp strand with swallow feathers I found in the basement of the toll house by the parking lot. This is the dream catcher that hung in my room in the J.S. Cain, which then became Eric's room, and which Eric returned to me when he moved out of that room at the beginning of this year so that Terra (now a permanent employee) could have the house along with her husband, dog, cat, bird, and brother-in-law. This dream catcher will stay here, a modern Bodie relic - it'd probably be bad luck to take it out of town anyway.

My hair grows long, barely grazing the tops of my shoulder blades. A single ponytail holder stands between me and cutting it short again, an unspoken promise that I'll let it continue to grow in spite of myself. Peppermint-soaked cotton balls find their way to the recently de-webbed corners of the room to disinterest further spider activity. Things find their places once more, slowly but surely, and the bed reappears. That quilt needs to be bagged for the quilt show. They said to describe it's story in 25 words or less. I did it in 47. Excess boxes clutter my space - do I recycle them, or are they good for something? It's the age-old question when you move every six months. Except that I move every 4. Since I graduated high school I have never been in one place for more than 4 months at a time. And yet here I am, honing in on that 4-month mark, and staring down the barrel of two more months in the same place.

But September is my favorite month here, when the days grow more introspective, the increasingly elderly visitors ask more insightful questions, and all is peace and quiet and crisp and clean. The aspens will start to change soon, you can feel it in the air, and I will be compelled to ride my bike up the Virginia Lakes road once more to engross myself in that decay-dent scent of autumnal detritus. Soup is on my mind - the duck soup that needs finishing in the fridge, the squash soup I gathered the ingredients for on my last trip to the west side, the chicken soup with the paprika that I love so much, the minestrone that I haven't made in over a year, Eric's chili cook-off which I darn well hope I will get to participate in this year. My visions shift from knitting tank tops to knitting sweaters, and I regret leaving so many of mine in Michigan. I sense a mail-order of sorts is forthcoming. In the meantime, my progressively threadbare flannel serves me just as well as it ever has, and I pull it close around me in the wake of the coming autumn chill. We've been through a lot of firsts together, that flannel and I, always making itself present in my life. There's no reason why it shouldn't do the same while I try to pin my beating wings down for a couple months longer than usual so I can enjoy one of my favorite places - possibly for the last time - in my favorite season.

The cusp of autumn is here, and I look forward to the season with placid joy.