Home and my soul breathes a sigh that I hear accompanying the slight wind moving through the bare, still corn stalks behind the house. I look up at the muted colors of the day, soft pale blues, yellow, and down at the greens and browns of the land that is underneath my jcrew flip flops. I feel like I'm in a dream, in a painting by Hopper. It's fall again and I'm so relieved. Relieved that my pottery barn catalog is filled with bay leaves and candles again instead of patio furniture, that the heated frenzy of summer has settled into neat little book bags on the shoulders of school children and that winter ahead is also bringing the promise of Christmas.
Something about the quiet dignity of those stalks suddenly makes me think of my mother and just how much I love coming home to see her face. To see those dark tired eyes searching mine. To feel her hands that used to look like mine. I love those hands. The brown skin on them. The wrinkles and lines that now gives them a wistful beauty that mine don't have. The bright pink nail polish that should only be worn by 14 yr old girls who live in staten island but that I can't persuade my mother to stop buying. Sometimes I think I drive two hours just so I can hold them in mine. I think about that verse in Ecclesiastes 3:11 that talks about how God "has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." I hope that one day if I get to be old and if I'm blessed with a daughter; that she'll find lots of wrinkles around my eyes and face and find that I'm as beautiful as my mom is to me right now.
What is it about the fall that makes me want to recite Verlaine, swish around words like languorous, and be filled almost to the brim with excitement but also melancholy?
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