On Fall (and on wanting to cry my eyes out)

There are a million things I should be doing right now, and sitting here writing is not one of them.

But yesterday was the first day of fall, and this morning when I went for a run, the road was sprinkled with color. And tomorrow and the day after, I know the leaves will clutter and huddle and shiver, even under the Indian summer sunshine. And by nightfall on Saturday, when we are back again to air so crisp and cold we'll shut the bedroom windows, I know I'll feel autumn around me like a cloak. And the soak will begin, when my favorite season, the dying one, rains down embers of a fire not quite out.

::

It's beautiful here, and I love the life I've been given to live in Ohio. But it seems like once an hour, I see a street or a beach or a house or a farm or a face I love--all of them in my head, all of them in Maine. And I can't quite cry about it, as if the loneliness hasn't risen high enough to spill over, as if the missing of it all isn't quite strong enough to flood me, to flush out tears.

I do wish I could just cry about it. I wish I could sit under the trunk-shoulder of a tree while we cry our eyes and leaves out, grieving a season past. But I can't. I suppose my leaves are still too green.

Maybe on Saturday, when we are back again to air so crisp and cold we have to shut the bedroom windows, when autumn wraps around me like a cloak. Maybe then, after enough fall days and colors pile up, maybe then I will cry.

In the meantime, I suppose I should get back to one of the million things I should be doing.

A Maine autumn rainbow, captured almost a year ago to the day.

This just in. As I was getting ready to hit publish and go do one of my million things, Dani called me. I went to her room to check on her "quiet time", and she said, "Mommy, remember when I was a littler kid in Maine, and you always sang the sleepy time song to me?"

I smiled and answered, "Of course! I didn't even realize we'd stopped singing it."

And she said, "Will you sing it to me now, when I'm in Ohio?"

And I nodded, and together we sang every sweet word of this made-up song spanning more than five years and twenty seasons.

{It's possible this little development will provide just enough melancholic drip to move my cry-my-eyes-out plan forward.}