LET ME COUNT THE WAYS . . .

[I racked my brain for new things to say about Autumn, the season that tops my list of favorites. There was nothing more that I needed to add to this love song from a few years ago.]

(With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I'm borrowing her phrase, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." From Sonnet 43 in Sonnets from the Portuguese.)

This is my love song to Autumn.

I love Autumn for its colors--never the same twice; adjusted and revised, tinted and deepened, over and over and over. Leaves, flowers, pumpkins, cornstalks.


I love Autumn for its fragrances--smoke from wood-burning fireplaces and stoves; the last barbecue of the season; the wine-y smell of fresh apples gathered into the barn at a local orchard; the spice of chrysanthemums ready to plant in flower beds.

I love Autumn for its sounds--lawn mowers and leaf blowers, the municipal vacuum truck; homeowners and carpenters finishing the last bit of repair or construction before the weather changes; rain--wind-blown or gentle--against the roof at night.

I love Autumn for the tastes we create, now that we can heat up the oven--raisin-studded oatmeal cookies, muffins, brownies (so quick to make!), apple pies and fruit crisps; chili in the slow cooker; pork roast with root veggies in the oven; soup, any kind, just so it's soup.

I love Autumn for the touch of soft leather gloves, the rasp of a hand-knitted scarf against my chin; the weight of a shawl or ruana over my turtleneck; corduroys and heavy denims for warmth. And socks! Heavy socks, reaching up the shins to keep out chilly air.

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As I gathered my thoughts for this post, a phrase kept playing in my mind: "Heaven and Nature sing!"

Well, of course they do! In every season Heaven and Nature sing a different song. I celebrate all of them--yes, even summer, my least favorite--but my true love is Autumn.

Even when we have the little season called Indian Summer, with its few days of sun and warmth, Autumn is much too short. Frosty nights are a foretaste of weather to come. 

But until that time, celebrate Autumn. Revel in her colors and tastes. Make room for cookies and soups. Heat up the outdoor grill one last time. Wrap up warm and go to your favorite team's football game.

Yes, indeed. Heaven and Nature sing!

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  CHANGE

[I'm repeating this post because (1) it's timely and (2) I've been distracted and sidetracked by a dying furnace . . . not a good thing with Autumn getting into high gear. So here's what I wrote some time ago. Hope it says something positive to you.]

We've just finished one third of the season of Autumn, and already I sense the big shift in temperatures, hours of daylight, amount of rain or sun. This time of year always finds me unsettled--not because of the weather, exactly, but because I know Autumn is progressing and will come to an end, and we'll be engulfed in Winter. I don't mean to hurry the seasons along--they seem to do quite well by themselves. If I could, I'd slow them down, so I could savor the sunny days and the few warm breezes that come my way. Yet, change is inevitable--time passes, life goes on, and everything changes. Everything.

You can always tell when the season is shifting, because I blog about transitions and change. Here’s the latest batch—they’re all visuals because I don’t have anything new to say about change.

 C. S. Lewis, known to many as the creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, became a Christian late in life and wrote many books about faith.

Maya Angelou is known for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as well as for many volumes of poetry.

Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic.

My  story--my life--is in my hands. Staggering thought, isn't it?

One early morning gratitude--mumbled while your eyes are trying to open, before the morning jolt of caffeine, before your feet hit the floor--just one expression of thankfulness can make a difference in how your day starts, continues, and ends.

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Change is taking place in my neighborhood. In the past year, three houses have sold, two at auction, a third in a private sale. This is remarkable because the whole street--one block long--has only 13 houses. 

Of the current occupants, only three were here when I moved in 36 years ago. We don't change quickly, but when we do--wow! Look out, world!

I expect to be here several more years--probably not 36, given the age I've attained. And I've made changes to my house; more coming shortly when the guys arrive to install a new furnace.

Since change is inevitable, you--and I--might as well try to embrace it.

Have a wonderful week!

SPINNING OFF . . .

Having just nearly confused myself with spin-off, sequel, sidequel, not to mention crossover, and not to be sidetracked by reboot or remake--as I say, now that I'm almost but not quite completely confused, I think I want to talk about a spin-off. My own, that is.

Take this saying: "Bloom where you're planted." Possibly Biblical, though not in those exact words, but the meaning is hanging around several passages of Scripture. This post is not about blooming where one is planted.

When I spun away from blooming where I was planted, I came to what happened after I moved on. (You may remember that my childhood was one of moving and moving on--17 times in my first 20 years.) 

Some people, I'm told, re-invent themselves each time they shift to a new place. 

• I'm grateful I didn't have awareness enough to do that because by now I wouldn't know myself.

Others take the old self (if you are't offended by that term) wherever they go--in some locales it fits right in; in others, it's the square peg in the round hole; in still others, the old self never actually enters into the life of the new arena.

Being a kid during all those years of uprootedness, I didn't have time to settle into one personality or another, nor to explore possibilities; time passed too quickly for experimentation and assessment.

But I did learn a couple of things:

• First, so long as I had school, I knew who I was, deep down. Being a student was more than a role to play, it was an identity I could wear like a second skin.
• Second, if I paid attention, there was always something I could learn about the place, the people, and (ultimately) about myself in each new location. This was a subtle thing that only became evident in later years. A lot of the learning was by osmosis.

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So, what did I learn?

• How to deal with different kinds of people. Not always a happy lesson. In southern Missouri I attended a one-room country school, circa 1951. A "city kid" like me (their assigned tag) couldn't understand what their lives were like. My book-learning was nothing to their life experience as farm kids. Good grades pleased the teacher, but made me few friends. 
• Feeling like a very small fish in an outsize pond. In a city the size of Wichita, KS (about 300,000 population in the 1950s), my small town self was again out of place; city bus schedules and routes were a mystery, going to six or more different classes with six different teachers in a single day was unheard of, and a racially integrated student body was like going onto a movie set every day.
• Going back to my hometown when I was entering high school. It wasn't as traumatic as I'd expected. I remembered quite a few of the students from my few years in the local elementary school. Some blooming began.
• Most of all: I learned that I wasn't much different from the kid who left home and lived in various places in the Midwest. I was still an only child, living with my mother and stepfather. I was one of 26 first cousins on my mother's side and one of 11 on my dad's. School was still my favorite place, though the public library ran a close second. And going to classes, learning new things, was where I felt most like myself.

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Now for the next step: What does a person do with that new self-knowledge?

I became a perpetual student, until teaching beckoned. Then it became blindingly obvious that all sorts of things can be taught--including choir music, knitting, sewing, letter writing . . . . And another blindingly obvious thought: I could still be a student! Keep on learning! Explore beyond the boundaries of my life!

I've often wondered what my life would have been had I not moved around a lot, met people from backgrounds different from my own, tried on new experiences. That knowledge is beyond me, but I've a motto that has served well over the years: "Nothing is ever lost, ever wasted." One small example: the characters in the stories I write come from years of gathering intel in move after move, state after state.

In a sense, I'm able to become all those people just by living in their stories.What I haven't experienced myself, I make up! That's what fiction is all about.

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My question for you--what have you learned when you moved on and bloomed in a new place?

Til next time,

Blessings from

Thursday's Child

 BALANCING ACT

You're probably saying, "This isn't new. Everybody knows practically everything in life is about balancing stuff--juggle this, try not to lose that, etc."

Don't you just LOVE those "everybody knows" generalizations? They're often so true. And, so not true.

Let's look at the true part first.

From my own experience, but not going back to infancy, I recall having to choose--if I wanted to take shorthand and typing in high school, I had to give up some other class. Once I'd wheedled my way into taking "five solid subjects," I could do both shorthand and typing, along with whatever else I had in mind. As I recall, my junior year it was French, first being offered at our school that year. (Latin and Spanish had always been there, but they didn't call my name.) Balancing was beginning.

After high school--college years, first time around; again choose courses, try not to have all of them on the same days if I wanted to keep some free time to study or do homework. And then finances came into it--a little part-time job at a tiny grocery store near campus, or typing stuff for professors on campus, almost anything that could be done for a few bucks a week, so long as it wasn't baby-sitting. (I never did get the hang of baby-sitting; my children will attest to that.) More balancing.

So, on to marriage--children--preserving sanity: all a balancing act. Plus, somewhere in there I was encouraged by my mother-in-law to finish my degree; so I signed up for a course, then two, and finally managed to emerge with a B.A. from Indiana University. With four kids at home and a husband who worked all day. Balancing ramped up sharply.

If you haven't tried keeping a marriage and a family going while conjugating French verbs and writing "learned" essays about Elizabethan poets, I must warn you: as Betty Davis said about aging, "It ain't for sissies."

But here I am, writing to you, lo, these many years later, having survived somehow (by hook or by crook, as Granny used to say), to let you know it's possible to balance your life events and not go under for the third time.

Well, that's enough about life being entirely a balancing act. Now let's look at the flip side.

What is not part of the balancing act? Or to put it another way, what can't be turned off, put aside temporarily, or set in stone?

Okay, science being what it is, and technology having got into the act, the nay-sayers are probably right in saying "practically everything" is a balancing act. But I offer up some examples of what is not part of the balancing act:

• our genetic make-up may not be set in stone, but it's pretty much here to stay; I can't turn off the fact that my blue-eyed parents made it virtually impossible for me to have brown eyes; nor can I modify whichever genetic code my grandmother gave me so I can be taller. The best I can do are contact lenses and high-heeled shoes.
• once a pregnancy is in evidence, it can't be set aside temporarily so the child can be born at a more convenient time. (Ask anybody--is there really a more convenient time?)
• and at least at this time, we can't live forever--our time on planet Earth is limited. We're not even allowed to know the day and hour of our departure. We just have the ticket to ride. (But don't discount science and technology--they landed people on the moon; it may just be a matter of time.)

You'll have some of your own, and I'll bet they're dillies.

-----

How do we do it, you ask?

All depends on how deeply you're invested in what you want.

In order to finish my degree, I had to let go of some "hafta" tasks: not every meal was made from scratch; baked goods appeared mostly at birthday time, and kids learned how to make a nourishing meal for themselves. Laundry was done on specific days, which changed with my class schedule. These modifications didn't always go as planned, but they made it possible for me to read a 700-page 19th century novel, in French, so I could pass the exam that week.

It became a matter of "keep your eyes on the prize."

Then when we had school vacations, I could sew or cook or bake; I could even not read unless I wanted to, and if I wanted to read, it wouldn't be anything that appeared on any college reading list--it would be a modern mystery novel, all about clever detectives solving problematic crimes in fascinating places.

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I'm still not very good at the balancing act, even though I've been at it for more decades than I ever thought I'd attain.

My check register and I currently don't agree with the bank, nor with each other.

I've let my sewing machines waste away for lack of use so I could spend more time painting pictures.

My current writing project stalled and finally stopped altogether--though I can't figure out why it broke down. I don't want to shove it to the side of the road and leave it to rust because I think it can be repaired, but still--

So though I may not be good at balancing, I do believe in it. There are no prizes, since it's not a competition. There are no awards for best balancing--but you do get to keep your sense of well-being when it works out. 

Best wishes for balancing challenges to come!

Blessings,

Thursday's Child