I love these faded zinnias, the ombre ghosts of the harvest. The beautiful echoes of a summer vibrance left behind after the first hard frost signals the end of the growing season. There’s new snow on our ancient mountains. The harvests are in. The hay is baled, the greenhouse vents are closed, and the fields are ready for winter. All is as it should be.
And yet…
Autumn has a rare gift for making one feel homesick for the abundance they are standing in the midst of. I think of it as the spiritual element of the changing season. The earth has given her all for the harvests we’ve enjoyed, and now she will take her rest. We bask in all the gifts that time, prayers, sweat, tears, and faith brought, but there’s a sense of “more” when you walk in the quiet autumn garden. A more that only becomes evident as it takes its leave. A stillness where the lush green once felt full of breath. A silence where summer birds and insects were raucous in their sounds. A melancholy of rest that reaches us only because the joy of growth was so immense.
It is not an unpleasant feeling. It is deep, like good soil, and full of all the good things I know will grow again in another season. It is the feeling that inhabits that liminal space where the eternal “now” slips over the edge into “then” and turns to memory.
We gather these ghosts and scatter them through the house, October remembrances of a hopeful May, and settle in again to the season of stories.
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