It's official. It's Fall. I got my first whiff of it back in mid-August. The air that morning was different than the day before, sly but there, a thing sensed. The first leaf fell on September 1st from a crab apple outside my office window, and now the ground is so covered with leaves it looks like a Hudson Valley quilt. There are millions more to fall in the next few weeks, but the mountains are just coming into real color, not yet peak but puffs of it. The song birds have flown, and the blue jays are back with their thuggish ways and grating shrieks. Transition. I keep hearing the tune to "Tradition" from Fiddler On The Roof only with the word "transition" instead of "tradition". Try it. Transition, Transition... See? Many ways to tell when these seasons are transiting but the game changer is when I no longer want tequila & lemonade and yearn for rum & apple cider.
One of my very smart and sophisticated west coast friends can't quite grasp the fact that I have chosen to live where I do. "You're Jewish," she wailed at me with a tone of unfathomable disbelief. "You went to Yale, for God's sake!" (Can't you just hear her?) "So did Bush," I pointed out. "Bush is not Jewish." "No, but he went to Yale." "What does that even mean?" she yelped. I had to admit I didn't know.
Wordsworth's definition of poetry was "emotion recollected in tranquility". John Hersey gave a lecture at Yale saying that the writer's life is like a pendulum. It swings out, and you gather material. It swings back, and you write it down. So, here is tranquility. Now is the time to write it down. If not now, when? Transition, right? Who knows? Good friends have recently died.
This afternoon at golden hour my son and I walked up the back to a hill where he was married only a month past. Another transition -- this little creature we plucked from South America twenty-five years ago (twenty-five days, twenty-five minutes -- It all went by so quickly!). We'd made a chupah from fence posts and tree limbs that looked out over the mountains on the far side of our valley. You hear the creek and the wind, and that's all. I walk this piece of land and I am calm. The silence is operatic. I am as full as a man can be.
I should report that the Bank of America tzorris continues to be a gigantic pain in the ass, but we have a lawyer on it, and it's slowly beginning to come clear. Sort of. But our house will remain our house. To paraphrase that NRA slogan (You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hand) -- You can have the key to my house when you etc etc etc. We'll get through this. Thanks to every one who helped. I probably won't write about it any more. I hope.
Remember: don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
Keep the faith.
