Fall in grace

The rain falls softly, finger tapping on the roof, marking time beyond our reckoning. The mist swirls and flows like the hem of a dress. A towering goddess, barefoot, dancing among the trees, pausing to free her skirts when they catch, then moving on. She chases the lingerers, chastens them, send them on their way, heads bowed, hurrying. Strips trees bare. Softens edges and horizon. A chatty, brooding goddess, full of mutters and shifting moods. A restless goddess giving, then moving on. Tapping, tapping, then moving on. I lean my forehead against the window and listen.

Yesterday, when summer lingered, lazy like a Sunday afternoon, so much could still have been possible. The green blush on the hills and fields beguiles. Leads me to wonder if and maybe this time I might unhinge the solemn procession of the seasons, that their gravity is not inevitable, that different ends may yet be chosen from the events thrown for us like runes.

I open the window to read the sky. For a moment, through a break in the clouds, stars shine through. A moment of sure clarity, but even as I reach to know the pattern, she turns, gathers her swirling skirts about her and begins her dance again. The glint of stars vanishes and the wind rises chill and anxious. I start to turn away but something in the wind; the smell of fallen leaves, the drip from eaves, the lamentation of the pines. Maybe one, maybe all, maybe some other note, an echo, long held and carried. I remembered.

I’d woken with the wind shift. Aware of the tide and where I’d moored the boat the night before. We’d gotten back late from the mainland, later than I’d planned. The tide had turned and I’d left her to ground out instead of putting her on an outside mooring so she was safe. She wouldn’t be afloat for hours.

That wasn’t it.

I listened. The house creaked in the rising wind. Some gusts hard enough to make the rafters shudder. I could hear the dead branches and blowdowns in the forest creak and grind, limb against trunk. Let the wind take them, more firewood close at hand. No harm there. I wondered what had woken me. Carly coughed downstairs in her crib. A hoarse and hacking cough. Deeper now than in the evening, harsher. She’d been flushed when we got up the hill and home, listless while supplies were put away. A long day ashore, that’s all. Not to worry. Nothing a night’s sleep won’t cure.

I lit a lamp and went downstairs. I held her, walked her, tried a bottle, sang lullabies. Still she was racked with coughing. Finally in desperation I opened the back door and stood out on the porch with her. The wind had come around to the nor’west, cold and sharp. Carly and I looked out at the night. No light but the stars through the remaining tatters of clouds. We were alone in the night, alone on the island. I had been alone on the island before, this was the first time I felt it. The first time I realized that nothing was the same.

Hard to pinpoint the day that summer ends. Hard to say when exactly fall begins. No wonder the ancients raised their standing stones and watched the stars. Many days I feel the shadow as of someone behind and turn without losing stride to look back. But no, just a passing cloud, a fretful gust, the scitter scatter of a crumpled wrapper. Merely shadows, momentary distractions on a summer afternoon. Yet fall comes, slow and still while I plan and organize, luminous with the lowering angle of the sun, settling like the billow of a sheet over a bed. Like so many things in life that arrive on quiet feet, there is no sense that they accompany us until our shadows merge and suddenly we walk together.

No standing stones mark my way but, like the ancients, I track the days. Recall the places where I pause. The measured steps. Thoughts collected and recalled in their appointed moment. Thus we imprint times and places, leave telltale signatures, tags, breadcrumb trails. Hopeful scatters along the way, proclamations or practical and practiced, they give the landscape a promise of familiarity in the face of vast and continuous change. In spite, just because, or even though. It seems so brave; so achingly forlorn.

This morning, I watched the dawn break and the storm settle over the city. The mist obscured the skyline leaving remnants of the towers standing like ragged battle standards above a long forgotten field.