Fall’s Beginning

Yesterday I turned a corner of sorts.

I had to begin using a cane while on my walks with Jinx. I usually carry a stick or a bokken (wooden sword) in case we encounter any less-than-friendly creatures on our rambles. But age and arthritis and the changing weather seized up all my joints yesterday, and I moved slowly all through my day’s duties, and when the evening had come and it was time to go exploring with the spotted menace, I needed something to actually lean on. The cane was one I bought one day in an antique store. I wonder who the original owner was? I wonder if the tree from which the wood was taken and shaped and curved and smoothed has any knowledge of what became of its life-material? I feel rueful and wry, but still very grateful. The cane feels somewhat alive in my hand, as wood always does, and I feel alive in the edged air, the air with apples and leaves humming through it.

Grateful for this weather, my favorite time of year, the autumn and winter, but forever shaking my head at the fact that it hurts, this time of year. Like ground glass in the joints, and sometimes like an icy fire. All the abuses I committed against my physical frame now come back to haunt me. All the pounding of fists into boards, all the too-heavy weights lifted, all the scuffles and brawls…they all parade before me and ask in their silky whispers….Was it worth it? 

Today would have been my wife’s mother’s one hundredth birthday. If she and my mother were alive, what tales they could tell us…and what horror would show on their faces if they were to look about the world their children are inhabiting now. A world of madness and meanness, where shadows are gathering and darkening, and men are actively rejecting truth and light. My wife and I are both grateful for our mothers, and we are equally grateful that they have passed already from this life to the next.

The crisp fall days will soon pass into brutal winter nights with the iron beauty of absolute silence, altered occasionally by the howls of things lupine and vulpine. But I know where to find warmth, and I am thinking of it even now, the quiet evenings with the lady I love, while the cold plays its tricks and makes the shallow and foolish men believe that those things beneath the frost are actually dead, to return no more.

Fall and then winter, and then….we know, don’t we?

~ S.K. Orr