autumnal hush
I know I've been quiet. call it an autumnal hush.
this sublime segue into winter is my favourite time of year -- the incandescent treetops, red-golds, the crunch of leaves in the gutter, and the world gently intimating mortality. that gentle intimation is what I like most -- and it's also why, I feel, sudden, abrupt deaths are so jarring & so mortifying. growth is so deliciously slow. a flower gradually unfurls; a tree gradually lengthens out of the soil; an infant gradually segues into a mother. and we're accorded the same privilege on the other end: we unfurl into old age. death is gently intimated to us; we and our loved ones come slowly to live with it. and so when someone dies suddenly -- in a car crash, a heart attack, a gunshot -- it's as though winter descends in a second. a carefully crafted tower crashes down, instead of being just as carefully dismantled. no wonder there is rage, devastation.
I'm unusually attuned to mortality -- to the gasping brevity of this paltry life of ours, with our moments snatched greedily in the sunshine. I was convinced, when I was younger, that to be old would be the most ghastly affliction: that I would commit suicide when I turned 60. but now I'm no longer so sure. what?--rescind my autumn? perhaps it's just as well we grow into old age. the other night, at a wonderful baritone-cello concert, I watched an old man in the audience instead, and his painfully tender interactions with his wife: their gentle gestures, the small kind touches, the ripened intimacy of their gazes, the slow, myriad devoted ways they comported themselves around one another. it looked, to me, like how trees do when the wind plucks the golden leaves from the tree boughs and, swirling, eddying, rippling, bears them ever so gently down to the earth.