That Time of Year

The day dawned blue bright as I stepped outside for my morning walk. The sun’s warm embrace, filtered through the breeze, kissed my face and once again, fall was merely the wistful sigh of a repeated dream. Was it just my imagination, or was Los Angeles not deep into the season of mellow fruitfulness only moments ago? In my own version of our collective experience, he’d snuck into town a month or so back, under the cover of beautiful apple-crisp mornings wrapped up in a misty bow of light.

My certainty slipped as I hurried on, surrounded by seamless sunshine. Perhaps it had just been the overheating of my miserable brain. Funny how dreams vanish when you try to take hold of them, something the poet Virgil was exquisitely familiar with:

..tenuisque recessit in auras
ter conatus ibi collo dare braccia circum
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago
par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno

Dissolving into the empty air she left me now
Three times I tried to fling my arms around her neck
Three times I embraced- nothing… her phantom
Sifting through my fingers
Light as wind, quick as a dream in flight (Aeneid II 791-794)

And yet tell tale signs whispered. The lingering puddles outside our door spilled the secrets of two glorious weeks of rain. I drove down the 10 through an incandescent downpour and a wave of joy summoned up Van the Man with shades of TS Eliot.

And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And never ever ever ever ever get so old again

The sun shot through the clouds with a silvery force as the rain fell all around in sparkling sheets and danced up again while the cars raced along. Magical moments with the Nephelai on the freeway.

The umbrellas, standing sentinel in our hallway, reported news of a solitary afternoon escapade- the hound refusing to share my watery enthusiasm- when I smiled with freedom amidst the torrent. For those rain-drenched moments, portals opened up in the middle of my Californian desert and shimmering greys and greens poured forth from European memories. Without missing a beat, my foolishly forgetful heart slipped further away into yearning for those early Manhattan days of wintry glamour and excited despair.

The muddy sneakers, yet to be cleaned, chattered away, lost in a narrative all theirs to tell. On the last day of our autumnal interlude, I trudged amidst a smattering of fallen leaves. The sky shivered and the sense of impending ending, a mournful lament, echoed quietly, rippling into space. For an instant we were in those liminal wards of winter’s outskirts and I walked amidst the desolation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73

These poems of ours. So integral to our years of daily peripatetic learning that I hear them breathing and whispering from all corners of our neighbourhood; by some rough magic they have woven themselves into the fabric of our physical life. In my mind’s eye I see through the aged face of the poet into Shakespeare’s worlds within worlds, through the loneliness of the stark branches outlined against the sky into the empty silent ruin of what was once a cathedral full of song and an overflowing congregation.

For a glimmering instant I remember why I am a pathological stalker of even the flimsiest evidence of seasonal change in our land of endless summer. I see the twilight, the banked fire and death’s inevitable approach. Yet through it all, the ending’s powerful paradox rings loud and true, a beautiful reminder of the spiritual strength to be embraced through heartfelt acknowledgement of the fleeting nature of all we hold dear.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long

We walk together my daughter and I, under the watchful eye of the morning sun once again; lines of dharma learnt and poetry memorized humming all around us. My mind is busy making connections: from carved faces, heads on platters to owls and the horrors of war. We turn a corner into the shade and without preparation, cool relief from the heat washes over us. I smile at the season’s mischievous face here in sunshine’s playground which pokes fun at the potential complacency of linear expectations. Carpe diem. Every moment of life is alive.