Life Right Now

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Is green edged with gold.

It is the first official day of autumn, but we have been observing its approach for weeks. The lingering heat and humidity made us doubt our eyes. Now that the air has shifted, now that we have retrieved our jackets from the back of the wardrobe, we cannot tell ourselves that the cherry trees with their yellow leaves are overeager.

The maples are shaded with color now. The pumpkins lined up outside the grocery store no longer seem presumptuous.

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September Sugar Maple  Maplehurst

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Last weekend, Jonathan and I buried two hundred daffodil bulbs on the slope above the driveway.

Every year when I trip over a just-delivered box of bulbs on the porch near our back door, I feel beleaguered. Who has time for bulbs when the younger two won’t stop poking one another then screeching and the older two are whining about after-school snacks and someone refuses to meet my eye when asked about his school reading log?

But every year when spring finally breaks through, I wish I had planted more. I always wish for more.

I am trying to remember that winter-weariness. Trying to remember what those bulbs will mean come April.

Two hundred daffodils are only the beginning. I’ll plant at least as many more when another box shows up some time in October. More daffodils, but also alliums for the new flower garden and tulips for the raised beds in the vegetable garden.

If I plant tulips anywhere else they’ll only be eaten by deer, so I fill a bed or two inside the picket fence. When the tulips are finished in May, I can fill those spots with tomatoes or peppers or beans.

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I am reading Terry Tempest Williams’ beautiful book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Early on, she writes, “Peace is the perspective found in patterns.”

When I came across that line, I put down my book and went in search of a pen. Her words describe something I have been living for years now, but only dimly perceived. The poetry of her sentence, with its alliterative P, has made something invisible in my experience visible to me.

The earth is full of patterns and rhythms. Some we merely observe but others invite collaboration. Like the planting of bulbs in autumn and the picking of flowers in spring.

These back-to-school days have been anxious days for me, but feeling again the net bag of bulbs stretched tight against the palm of my hand is like feeling my head surface above deep water.

I can breathe again. The peace of a larger, more meaningful perspective fills my lungs.

Homework may go unfinished, my children may go on poking and screeching, but wasn’t it only yesterday I was digging in bulbs with a baby strapped to my back? And isn’t it only tomorrow when those bulbs will bloom again?

The earth spins so fast. There is so much to remember (not homework but the feel of a baby on my back). There is so much to anticipate.

The present moment is always what matters most. But it matters most when it is rooted in memory even as it reaches toward that which is still to come.

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