And the images.....
This time of year my shoulders are generally up around my ears as the wind cuts through my coat and sneaks up my sleeves and down my collar, making me cranky that I own a dog larger than a teacup. But it's in the fifties again today. It's unusually warm weather this late into fall and in carpe diem mode, I galvanize and bank one more gentle sunny memory before winter arrives with its usual subtlety of a freight train. In addition to the glorious weather, the dog's started thyroid hormone and so rather than dragging a deadish dog behind me as I have the past few months, I have my old perky walking buddy way out in front again. I even find my iPod in the kitchen....again and again it's lost somewhere in the house...because it's tinier and flatter than my silver dollar pancake brain.
Throughout the neighborhood, everyone's dressed for the summer costume party, baseball caps and sweatshirts, shorts and sunglasses, donned as they unpack the Christmas lights and outdoor decorations for the next six weeks. A big contrast to the standard dress of Wisconsin Christmas decorating, parkas, snowmittens and facemasks while trying to hook stiff strings of lights to rain gutters balancing on step ladders in a foot of snow. The boy scouts delivered their Christmas greens yesterday so garlands and wreathes now overlap the fall decorations by necessity. Anticipatory of four months of below-freezing temperatures, this weekend is THE weekend to "get 'er done," whatever 'er is at one's house for the holidays.
The willows are finally reluctantly losing their leaves, while one apple tree on no man's land miraculously still clings to its apples long after its leaves have fallen away.
Touch football, walks in the woods, unhurried as yet waterfowl relaxing by unfrozen ponds, driveway games of H-O-R-S-E by boys in shorts and t-shirts, joggers, gardeners trimming the last of summer's faded glory and turning the soil one last time...
The sermon in church this morning was about gratitude. I am grateful today, maybe for global warming, and for my ability to walk in this sunshine and see sights like an apple tree with no leaves and all its apples, because next week this path could well be frozen.
Lovely. Perhaps my favorite discovery of life up nort' (even farther than you, I'm always astonished to re-realize!) is the true meaning of carpe diem. Gathering rosebuds. After decades in the sub-tropics, where there is no sense of urgency because freezes & thaws rarely loom, I'm gob-smacked by the insistent passing of the seasons. I finally understand my MinneSOHtan husband, after 22ish years. And I love that Thanksgiving this year smells like spring. (And I now know what spring smells like!) Thanks for illustrating with such detail, and for including my friends, the yellow, stubborn willows.
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