Autumn, Maine Gets Real

This morning, while standing on the back porch wringing yesterday’s rainwater from my swimming togs, I spied a poult turkey in my garden!

Having worked diligently over the years to construct as impenetrable a fence as reasonably possible, I’d be fooling myself not to acknowledge that it’s only a matter of time before they find their way in. One summer day this season, I looked out to see a flock of turkeys perched atop the fence and thought, Well, this is it. They’ve figured it out…

Thankfully, they weren’t quite as clever as I feared. But this one juvenile seems to have found her way into the garden’s bounty while her momma fretted, called, and paced on the outside. Meanwhile, the little one was feasting on the inside!

I quickly dropped my swimming togs and headed for the garden. Momma moved off, and I left the gate open, hoping to quietly encourage the chick to find her way out. Of course, she panicked. She tried to fly, failed to see the chicken wire, and flung herself repeatedly against the barricade.

Like it or not, I was going to have to capture her to set her free.

As a longtime chicken keeper, I knew how to do this safely: gently grasp her body, keeping her wings neatly folded against her breast. Once safely in my hands, she calmed down and seemed to resign herself to her fate.

Imagine her surprise when, gently placed on the ground outside the garden, she discovered she was free to roam once again!

I’ve been thinking about how often life asks us to venture into unfamiliar territory, drawn by something we cannot quite resist, only to discover that the very things that beckon us forward can also leave us feeling exposed, uncertain, and a little unsure of how to find our way out.

This fall has felt, in many ways, like just such a discovery. A season of holding the joyous and the perilous together, allowing them to exist side by side. There is the beauty of autumn and the quiet anticipation of the winter to follow. The comfort and solitude I find at home, alongside the deep awareness and ache that rise when I enter the empty bedrooms of our daughters. They are fully gone and yet still so here.

There is the heart-expanding love of my granddaughter, and the pride I feel watching her mother—once my child, now a mother herself—mother her own child with such brilliance. It is beautiful, and heartbreaking, and profound in ways I am still learning to understand.

Perhaps these are the first sparks of wisdom: the realization that I no longer need to defend what I know, or persuade anyone of what I have come to believe. Perhaps I can simply let it unfold.

I think of the milkweed pods, grown full with seeds, waiting for their moment. They dry and age, then begin to split open, releasing their downy seeds into the wild, open air. They do not concern themselves with where the seeds will land or what will become of them. Their work has been to provide a warm, safe place for the seeds to mature until the moment arrives when the wind is right and they take flight. What happens next is no longer theirs to determine. Come what may, the seeds begin.

And still, in so many ways, I feel like a beginner.

Ed and I are entering our own autumnal season of our lives as parents of children who have grown and gone, and we are discovering, once again, who we are beneath the responsibilities and commitments that knit our lives so tightly together for so many years. There is a new kind of freedom here, though not without its own uncertainties. We are learning to inhabit a life that is more fully our own, even as we feel the tenderness of all that has changed.

For me, that has meant discovering both the joy and the fear of bringing something new into the world: a creative endeavor, a concert and dance series taking shape in our community. I find myself beginning again, not knowing exactly where it will lead, but feeling the pull to see it through.

For Ed, it has meant gradually setting aside his professional obligations and turning more fully toward the life we share. There is something quietly moving about this turning toward one another, about learning to be together in a different way after so many years of being pulled in so many directions.

We are learning, perhaps, that a life does not become smaller simply because some of its roles fall away. It changes shape. There is room for new things to take root, for old things to be held more gently, for love to deepen even as the familiar contours of family life shift around us.

Like the milkweed seeds, we have been held and nourished by the life we built. Now the wind is changing. We cannot know exactly where it will carry us, only that there is still living to be done, still beauty to discover, still a world beyond the familiar waiting to be entered.

Come what may, we begin.

And so, perhaps, beginning again is not always a solitary act. Sometimes it means opening a door, making room, and inviting others in. It means creating the conditions for something to happen, without knowing exactly what will come of it. A little like scattering seeds, or setting a dance in motion.

This Sunday, we begin the Long Winter’s Night Series with a free community contra dance, with Owen Marshall and Maggie Robinson taking the lead, as they so often do. It is an invitation to share in the simple, enduring joy of social dancing, a New England tradition that has brought people together for more than a century.

Come and see. If you can walk, you can contra dance. And if that feels like a stretch, come to listen, come to watch, come simply to be together.

More than ever, that feels real and true to me: the importance of making room for one another, of finding joy where we can, of continuing to gather and create something together, even as life changes around us.

See you Sunday.