Seasons of Change by Janie DeVos

    

     Last week was the official start of fall, though I’ve been watching for signs of it for a few months now.  Oddly enough, at the end of June every year, just a precious few leaves on the road leading up to my house change into a radiant orange, heralding the fact that autumn is on its way and that another change of seasons will soon take place.  But, after those few orange Buckeye leaves appear, teasing me and setting me to panting like a hungry dog waiting for a thick beef bone, nothing else happens.  Zippo!  Not another leaf budges from its stubborn, monotonous shade of green for the next three months, until we get the first cold snap, and then wha-la, fall quickly arrives in all of its splendorous, wondrous, glorious color.  

I love autumn so much that I try to urge it on.  I decorate my front porch with the usual fall décor on the first pre-season football game since, to my mind, football goes hand in hand with cool, crisp evenings, tail-gating in zip-up jackets with team insignias on them, bowls of chili, and thick plaid blankets.  Thus, I can reasonably argue that fall has arrived when the first coin has been tossed between the captains of opposing teams.  Interestingly, no one makes fun of my mid-August display.  Instead, I’m asked where I get my pumpkins so early.  Proudly, I point over to my pumpkin patch on the other side of our driveway.  Yes, we grow our own because I’m a fall fanatic, and my husband tries to placate me when the warmer months arrive (his favorite), by ordering pumpkin seeds of all kinds and readying the garden for another crop of them.  He knows the way to my heart. 

Inside my house, the fall theme continues in even a bigger way.  Berry garlands adorn cabinet shelves and mantles, centerpieces are made up of rust-colored candles set atop autumn-motif candle holders, and the little faux pine tree with white fairy lights that I keep in my living room corner all year is covered with faux fall leaves.  When I turn on the tree’s lights, golds, reds and oranges glow softly among the branches, and I stand back and ask myself, who doesn’t love fall? 

This year is a little different, though.  I’m distracted.  When I look out at my yard, instead of straining to see which leaves have turned overnight, I’m seeing paint colors, fabric swatches and backsplashes in my mind’s eye, and it’s because the house we’ve been in the midst of building for the last year and a half is almost done.  It’s the house I wrote about in my blog, The Head vs. the Heart. (https://wordwranglers.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-head-vs-heart-by-janie-devos.html)

In it, I talk about the fact that with aging comes planning, and now that my husband and I are in our 60’s, we’ve had to take a hard look at how feasible it is to live in our three-level mountain house in our later years—even later than now.  So, we built a home on the lake, which is about forty-five minutes south of us, and it’s a house that’s not so difficult to navigate during any season of the year.  It’s also not far from where our friends are, or our church and Rotary club.  As a matter of fact, a couple of our good friends from Rotary also have lake homes less than two minutes from ours.  So, I’m busy thinking about which colors to use in the new house; what tweaks have to be made before we sign off on the builder; and what still needs to be added to the lists of the little and big things I need in order to set up house again from scratch.  It’s all exciting, exhausting, and distracting.  

Needless to say, writing has been put on hold for a time, which is usually something I look forward to settling into when the first leaves start swirling around on a biting north breeze, and I miss it.  But, the change of seasons that I’m most caught up in right now are the changing seasons of our lives; the readying of ourselves not for the bonfires and football games, or pots of soup and the holidays, but readying ourselves, instead, for those days when a three-story house is impractical and when we’ve downshifted to a slower pace.  It’s scary in some ways, and intimidating, but it’s a fact of life: My husband and I have entered the autumn of our lives.  

When that little realization first entered my mind, it was like a small sucker punch to the gut, but then something wonderful dawned on me: Autumn is my favorite season of all.  And though that season of life is not one I tried to hurry on during my spring and summer seasons, it has arrived all the same, and I just might find there’s a wonderful beauty in it, and a certain joy and contentment that I never quite expected there to be.  I just might.  Especially if I’m looking for those things as enthusiastically as I watch for the changing leaves.