editorial

Sweater weather

Is it just me, or is autumn even more astonishing than usual this year? Walking out the door each morning, I feel knocked out by the air, the sky, the trees. The trees! Isn’t it enough for trees that all year they lord it over us with their size, their green lushness, their regal know-it-all presence? And then in autumn they pull out the stops and turn red, for crying out loud. It’s an overstatement of some kind, if I could only figure out what.

Then there’s the smoky scent of air, the whisper of breeze in trees, the crunch of leaves underfoot.

I wish my mother could feel all this too. She died in August, and that might have something to do with how acutely I’m feeling autumn this year. Sometimes after loved ones die, I want to feel the world for them as well, and over the years I’ve accumulated a bunch of people standing on my shoulders. And now my mom is there, too.

Perhaps that’s why the metaphor that compares autumn with middle age (okay, late middle age) seems true this year. By this time of life, we carry with us so many who are no longer here that their presence makes us bigger somehow. The smells seem deeper, the blues bluer, the ice cream sweeter than it used to be. While I miss my mom keenly, I’m surprised and pleased by the richness of these days.

Of course, there’s nothing like having your remaining parent die to realize you’re next in line. My mom told me she was ready to die. She believed she’d go to heaven to be with my dad, the love of her life, once again the beautiful young woman in the grey coat who caught the eye of the kind, handsome guy with the tennis racket.

I wish my mom were right about heaven, but I doubt it. Of course, nobody knows. I do know that I’ve got my mom on my shoulders now, along with so many others, and the whole squad of us feels blown away by this lovely autumn. And I can’t imagine ever being ready for this world to end.

—Diane Chiddister