2009-09-21
Autumn is likely to unleash a heady nostalgia in me. When I was a mere 15, I feel deeply in that thing we call love in the autumn. I was eating apples by the bushel, I was carrying them to school in a small tin and if I ran into me then, I'd probably feel a strong a sudden embarrassment for the rawness of my teenage heart and mind. How hopelessly bright and burning were my passions then! How wonderously was I willing to be a person whose secrets and heart were open for the new people in my life.
And in the car ride home last night, in the darkness, departing from another ceremony to celebrate love, a wedding that had some moments of honesty about the hardness of a lifetime commitment, where someone spoke of the hopefullness of weddings, and the hopefullness of love, I was grateful, perhaps for the first time honestly and deeply grateful, to the person I fell in love with that autumn 15 years ago, for decaying and merging the ache of first love into the smells of autumn, so that for me every time the leaves turn and the apples are ready, I get to remember the agony and wonder of first love. I grant you it is sweet and savory all at once, but I am always torn by this battle at breakfast time too.
Summer also earns my love for being the season of my long-love, and for being the season of magical nightimes and bug bites, but autumn, I agree with all these September weddings, is the season for magic and remembering we are mortals, and for remembering all we have to love, and all we have loved.
My skin is peeling from a sunburn I earned on a San Francisco bicycle ride and I am alive. I like how my surfaces are peeling and my heart is bigger and weaker and more forgiving that I think it has ever been. I defend the awesomeness of history to 18 year olds. I defend the ways we fail each other and ourselves by trying to understand each other. I am a tremendous teacup of love, just spilling over into the dish I rest in. The best part of that autumn of teenage love is that my friend from back then remains my friend now, and we can dance in the barn and outside the barn, and giggle in the darkness and eat red meat and not eat red meat. Love, my big old heart says; love, my then-young heart said, its chance-taking and hopeful, and this world is full of junk that might encourage you to disbelieve you contain a huge tar pits of love, bubbling soaking pools of love, geysers of love. old faithfuls of love.
its not infallible, but it sure smells nice.