Museum and Gold

The homely satisfaction of smelling apples in the bin or
of counting our jars of applesauce on a pantry shelf is only half the
experience of being human in October. The companion half
is that of walking out through the thinning orchard, where dry
leaves run ahead of us along old furrows.
--Bonaro W. Overstreet

    Today, I'll be going up to the Blue Ridge Mountains with a friend. But she's running a little late, so I've been doing some long-needed cleaning of my room. While I was doing so, I realized I had a lot of letters and cards that I really needed to put away somewhere. I have scrapbook that I've had since gradeschool; I've been putting all my letters and cards in there for a long time, and I hadn't opened it in months. To think I had ever imagined it would be a chore to go back into it to place new memories in!

   A scrapbook is like a memory museum. It frames the past, like glittering jewels, reminding us of past times and friends, friends we've lost or still hold dear. It's something to remind us what's really important in this life. And to include new memories, new friends in there is something not to be missed. I think someday I shall soon buy a new scrapbook, one bigger and a lot cuter...though the look of it doesn't really matter. But still, museums are places of marble and grandeur, though what attracts us to them are the pictures of the past, not how they look. But it's how important the past is that makes us wants to make it all beautiful and grand. 

    The importance of the past is only matched by the importance of the future, and both are just barely beat by the present. The present moment...invaluable, like a treasure. Every second, like a box waiting to be opened, an opportunity and a space for us to use,  like waiting for someone or something. It's an empty space that can be filled with joy or frustration. 

     Ah, Simple Abundance has updated for October! As always, it's worth sharing and keeping here:

 Last week as I entered the greengrocer’s shop I was stunned by the abundance of white, green and (Hermés worthy) orange pumpkins, along with a bounty of squash, ears of dried corn and pots of beautiful burgundy and yellow mums. Is it that time of year already? Everything was so gorgeous. Such simple splendor. I wanted to scoop up an assortment of visual candy corn and take them home to decorate. But with a catch in my heart, I heard a bad tempered, parsimonious fairy scold me: “Don’t be ridiculous…you’re not wasting your time on that tat on your own…Be practical.” Well, the rest of the conversation was so thoroughly unpleasant I’ll spare us both total recall. But the point of my brief encounter with sudden beauty is confessing that every creative urge was completely squashed. Secretly since then I’ve been moping and mourning the past, especially as I remember how much fun I had decorating with the seasons once upon a time when my little one was little and I was Mother Plenty in her eyes. This yearning has prompted many unexpected musings during my own personal “Season of Relinquishment”. In the last few months I’ve had to say good-bye to so many things I’ve cherished including my English idyll and I won’t kid you, losing a beloved home is hard; it hurts in places we never knew existed. The unruly and cavernous losses in life that everyone seems to be facing each day can’t be carefully managed with the right software program. Sometimes the raw enormity of your unmooring overwhelms as a perfect storm ambushes you in a grocery aisle full of pumpkins.

Still, my Southern mother taught me well and truly that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” and perhaps that is why I haven’t really been able to share myself and my thoughts as freely I’ve done in the past. However, the dry leaves aren’t the only things to race a head of me as time shortens each day—not only in the length of hours of light—but in my whirling dance to keep and catch up.

“Poplar trees yield their yellow leaves to sudden morning wind. A woman glancing out of the window as she washes dishes feels a tug at the heart—here it is again,” Bonaro W. Overstreet writes in Meditations for Women (1947). “Hands idle a moment, she marshals what she needs for the understanding of autumn—a philosophy of life and death, the two strangely one…The woman alone in her kitchen nods to herself, ‘That’s how it is. [But] you can’t get ready for loss at the very moment when it happens—not the loss of the poplar leaves, nor for the loss of a person you love. You get ready for all the lettings go by being as wise as you know how in all the moments of living.’ She looks out at bare trees—and smiles—and goes on with her dishes.” 

-Sarah Ban Breathnach, October 2012