This season puts me in a constant state of nostalgia. I'm nostalgic for people that are no longer in my life (not necessarily dead), for homes that I used to occupy, the bellies of the pets I used to scratch, the schools I once attended, a wood fire that I never had, down comforters that swallow me, piping hot apple cider that burns my tongue, homemade pumpkin pie with a mountain of whipped cream... Nostalgia isn't those things in particular; it's the feeling associated with them.
This season makes everyone nostalgic. I use “everyone” loosely. Those who hate autumn would just prefer not to feel nostalgic. Time is changing in autumn and changing times remind us of what once was, what may never be again and the life that continues on; we keep growing older and the ones we love are doing the same. It's no wonder people relish in the feeling of summer when the air is thick, campfires rage until the small hours of the morning, and the smell of grilling burgers fill the air. Time stands still in summer. And when autumn strikes, and it does nearly every October of the year, we begin the countdown to March when the flowers begin to bloom and the delusion of stopped time emerges again.
Autumn: a period of maturity or incipient decline.
I associate Autumn with cooler weather and longer nights, I'm sure you do too. It's when I shake off my heavy sweaters, dig out my flattened boots and put flannel sheets on my bed. Autumn is when I relearn how to be okay with the “incipient decline” of the Universe, including the actual lives of people past and present. I never particularly like sitting in my “period of maturity” but I find it's as necessary for me as breathing is because I hate complacency and stagnant movement.
I hate missing things as much as you do, believe me, but there’s just something about nostalgia. I have to allow myself to long for the past that has happy personal associations because there's a satisfaction after the terror of the missing that is unlike any other satisfaction. For one, it means I get to experience, for a brief moment, what it feels like again to sit at the kitchen table on a blustery fall day with my mom, watching her wrap her hands around her blue coffee cup to warm them. She is in her pink bathrobe, preparing for chemo or maybe preparing to live and telling me to dress warm for school. John Lennon said it, “Life happens when you're busy making other plans” or something like that.
Another thing I relive in autumn is my brother, healthier than now, sitting in his red Probe (was it a Probe?) singing along with the Steve Miller Band. We are sitting in the parking lot to Hollywood Video, the one that was down the road from Columbia Heights High School, on the corner of 49th and Central. We were having a brother and sister day and I was barely big enough to see over the dashboard of his car, my feet swung to the beat of “Joker.” We browsed the aisles for a movie to watch at home, I pretended to be looking because I was going to watch whatever he wanted. After all, my big brother was spending his entire day with ME and it didn't get better than that. Until, of course, he found me in my aisle of Disney movies and said, “Let's go to the theater.” We didn't know what was playing, or the times, so we went to Apache on a whim. He smoked a few cigarettes while we waited for our show and among my glory, I still can't recall the movie he took me too.
Among other feelings that I experience in the season of nostalgia is the excitement of building a home with my past boyfriend and father of our daughter. I remember the waiting-to-be-landscaped yard, the hours of elbow grease we put into the kitchen, the men who sanded the floors so they shined just enough to see your own reflection, and collapsing on a mattress on the floor among mountains of boxes. It was my first home that I made as a family. It is difficult, no doubt, to remember what was because the family I created is no longer together in that home but that's the complexity and perplexity of life: things don't last. I have moments of sadness that wave over me from time to time and I know they always will. It's called grief; the learning to accept the end of the life of my six year relationship with someone I still adore to this day because he is a good man. But happiness doesn't ride on the coattails of being a good man any more than it rode on the coattails of me being a good woman. Abigail Thomas said it best in her book Safekeeping: she loved this man she had been so unhappy with. I think he'd say the same about me.
These memories embody some kind of pain; I can't share blustery fall mornings with my mom, my brother's health is declining in his addiction, and my family of three is growing in opposite directions than the dreams we once shared. But if that's the “incipient decline” of the coin, than here's the “period of maturity”: I'm okay without it (if “it” is what I'm missing) or I'm okay with it (if “it” is what I have to live with missing). Tomato/Tom-ah-toe, I suppose. Bottom line is: I'm okay. The moments with my mom paved a road to appreciate what happens now, and not what I want to happen. The memories of my healthy brother plants seeds of hope in an often bleak forecast. And perhaps the greatest lesson is the one involving my past relationship: the end of something that didn't make us happy, created ownership of our happiness.
Some photos for your viewing pleasure:
Nothing brings me more pleasure than colorful tree lines streets
What screams Autumn more than the color orange?
