This time of year is hard, I find. Despite our family celebrating three birthdays in October, and enjoying the moments of glorious color, invigorating breezes and an arousing sense of change in the air, soon the shift comes. The leaves fall, the sky grays, the trees become skeletal silhouettes, the garden beds must be turned under or mulched. The dahlias and glads must be dug; the last rose of summer must be cut before the frost. Once the time change comes, I am lost to melancholy.
I have been trying to learn from Native traditions and have found solace in some different perceptions of our connection to earth. Particularly wonderful has been Robin Wall Kimerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a life and perspective-altering introduction to new ways of understanding our place in nature. Just the other day I found a new way to view the fall of the year. Instead of my usual feeling that this season is about loss, darkening and retreat, fall can be felt as a time when the plants all around us offer an exuberant and extravagant production of seeds and roots and corms full of stored vitality and the mysterious power of life for the coming future. How on earth does an acorn know how to become an oak tree? How can a tuber produce an outrageously brilliant dahlia bloom? Even the violets participate — creating odd little budlets that on closer inspection transform into seed pods that spring open and scatter themselves among the grass blades. That’s how they turn up everywhere in the spring!
This year it feels that fall has been longer than usual, starting all the way back in March. We have watched so much fall away: 230,000 people lost to the pandemic and a new surge underway; the loss of contact with beloved friends and family members unable to visit; the loss of dignity and decency and fair play and integrity in our government; jobs and income lost; rituals and fellowship disrupted in our churches and synagogues and other places of worship; lives lost to police violence; trust lost between citizens and the police and other officials supposedly entrusted to protect and support us; community institutions and events canceled; the distortion of truth to the point of vanishing. We lost a giant of the Supreme Court and watched a cynical and hypocritical replacement process that made a mockery of our Senate. The loss feels 360 degrees.
My original instinct was to grieve the cutting of the last dahlias, the final roses, a handful of sunny calendula. Then an amazing thing happened. It started with the surprise of cyclamen putting up new flower buds. I have rescued these plants time and again over the years through bouts of scale or mysterious wilting. And suddenly they are rejuvenating and unscrolling flowers again, just in time to soften the loss of outdoor flowers. Monday I noticed some Christmas cactuses that quietly budded up while on the porch over the summer. All at once they are bursting into pink and fuchsia glory. The cactus that came from my mother more than 30 years ago blooms faithfully the week before or after Christmas. But these others are more unpredictable — appearing before Thanksgiving, or in time for the advent of spring. Here they are, surprising us again.
Is it possible, as we come into the darkest time of the year, that this week we will all be surprised and see the new buds and sprouts of our democracy pushing vigorously into sight?
Judith Wagner is a retired environmental planner, avid gardener, sometime believer in rejuvenation who lives in Northfield.