October

I sit in the sun at the table, looking into the yard, at color so astonishing I want to weep. This bittersweet beauty of fall, the season of death. Such vivacity! Mother Nature has a sense of irony, if not humor.

Blood red, blood orange, everywhere I look, blood. Even the cardinals are back, having spent their summer in the nearby woods. They camouflage themselves within the burning bush, patient for a chance at the feeder.

The whitethroats have come and gone, whistling that half-assed autumnal version of their singular call. Now the juncos are moving through. They swirl around the yard en masse like miniature tornadoes, vying for seed with the usual suspects -- chics and nuts, squirrels and chips, pigeons and stars.

The dog thinks she's Joe Hunter. She lies in wait beneath the lilac, striped in shadow like a tiger, her head a periscope riveted toward a chipmunk across the grass. She could remain like that for an hour, half the morning, the whole of her being quivering in some species memory, some ancient life-and-death struggle that lives still in her muscles like a ghost.

Ghosts are everywhere. Ducks and geese, grouse and pheasants, bear, moose, deer. The haunted season.

The first dog died in the fall, and the second. My grandmother. My mother. Better to bow out in such vibrancy, however brief, I suppose, than hold on into the long dark cold. And then comes spring, so giddy, so sophomoric, who wouldn't be susceptible to such a reprieve? Followed by the easy drunkenness of summer, crowded and predictable. Better October, the year at its zenith, one more for the great migration.

Now a crow has appeared, motionless on the rim of the birdbath, a black hole against the scarlet ivy crawling across the fence behind it. Black Hole locks eyes with Joe Hunter, it's a staredown. My money's on Joe, but nothing feels certain. Not any more.

Except death. And taxes. Who was it said that?

And it's certain I can't stay here, in this moment, however much I might yearn to. Weeping, yearning. Such old-fashioned words. For an old-fashioned season. The best I can do is to save it, this window-moment, a snapshot to be held up against the years as they go by. More years behind now, than ahead. The snapshots strung together like a necklace. Or a chain.

This is the link I would choose. This place of simultaneous being and ending. Like holding two fundamentally opposing viewpoints at the same time. Someone said that, about artists. Who? The point being, despite the improbability of it, one is somehow still able to function.