November 5th 1999

I still remember this day, exactly 13 years ago. I remember the smell of the hospital mixed with the smell of flowers. I remember family members squeezing into a smallish room. I remember my uncle making some comment on how song lyrics used to be much less complicated and then quoting the Beatles' "I love you, yeah yeah yeah." I remember seeing my Grandfather cry inconsolably. I remember standing in a circle around my Grandmother's hospital bed. I remember holding her hand. I remember what her last breath looked like. I remember saying the Lord's Prayer while holding hands with my family around her bed after she left.

I haven't really talked about this memory much. This was one of my first experiences with death, at 11 years old, and it was terrifying and sickening. I wrote this date down in my little kitten diary, though, so I would never forget it.

I'm wondering now if I should post this - it's a bit morose and personal. I was intending to write more about my gratitude to Eleanor for mothering my own Mother, who in turn so wonderfully mothered myself, Jenny, and Louis with such profound wisdom, compassion, joy, whit, and skill.

And oh how I miss Grandma's yellow kitchen, that blue room, that den, that bookshelf with unlimited Dr. Seuss books, that living room with the spinning clock on the TV, and that dining room with all the pictures and the candy dish. What a magical, magical place.

"Goldener light sets noon a sleeping like an afternoon; Colder airs come stealing, creeping from the misty moon"

Yesterday was the first day of Autumn. Well, not actually, but as Brianna would say, yesterday was the beginning birth pains of Autumn. The air suddenly turned cool, the colors suddenly changed, and the scent of the air was suddenly that of the beginnings of decay. Something strange has been happening without fail for the past several years whenever the weather abruptly changes to Fall. Unlike any other smells of the different seasons, the smell of Autumn makes my heart ache. Winter makes me reverent and reflective, Spring excites me and sets my soul spinning, Summer brings out my inner child, but Autumn pierces me. Autumn is simultaneously glorious and intensely painful.

Just as soon as I took my first step outside yesterday, my eyes were delightfully surprised by the changed colors, not in the trees necessarily, but in the glow of the sun set against a crisp sky with rolling clouds. However, as my eyes delighted in the colors, my heart was pierced with the beginning smells of decay that bring back such vivid memories from Autumns past. These memories consist of exciting stages in my life, building new friendships, the glory and excitement of falling in love, reckless abandonment to joy, warm drinks with friends, bundling up and reading a good book, crazy unpredictable weather, love delayed and unfulfilled, disappointment, despair, and the list goes on. All of the memories of events, people, emotions, or brief moments in time flood back with just one intake of air.

Why is it that Autumn and no other season does this to me? The pain and pleasure are not unwelcome, I must confess. There is a certain satisfaction in this nostalgia. I am reminded that these events in my life, the good with the difficult, are what have been used to form and grow me. I would not change any of it at all. I can only hear God telling me, “Get excited, for I have great things in store for you”. I wonder what sort of events, people, emotions, etc will be stored with my composite of Autumn memories this time, to be remembered in future Autumns.

Ps. My title is taken from G. MacDonald' poem: "Autumn Song"