October’s Back

October’s back…and she’s lovely.

This morning, I scooted barefoot down the front porch steps to grab the Sunday New York Times in its trademark sky blue plastic sleeve from the driveway and run back inside before the neighbors could see me. Clad in my favorite pink cotton tank top and matching seafoam green pj pants, sans makeup and sporting full messy unwashed bed head, I noticed a definite change in the air.

October’s cooler and more assertive than her lazy summertime sister who lured me outside each weekend for the past five months. Time after time, I was drawn without thinking to the big grass-colored lounge chair on the deck facing the garden filled with purply globed eggplant, juicy red tomatoes, and fiery orange peppers. I’d sit there for hours, book in hand, bare legs and coral-painted toes soaking up the warm sun as a precious, time-limited commodity not to be wasted, not for one second.

For when you live in Michigan – and this seems to be more true than ever, after Detroit’s recent troubles and the economic hardships plaguing the region for the last several years – there is a perpetual recognition that the weather, like life itself, is fleeting, that things can turn on a dime, for better or for worse, in both expected and wholly unforeseen ways.

It’s a different place here now than when I grew up. There’s a cynicism that didn’t exist when the auto companies were fat, before the unthinkable happened and GM went bankrupt, taking our collective confidence and sense of security along with it.

Back when I was a kid, even though your parents scrimped and saved, told you to finish your green beans while you thought of the starving children in Ethiopia, you knew instinctively that things would work out okay. You felt safe, knowing there was enough for family vacations to Florida and visits to cottages up north and an abundance of presents under the Christmas tree.  We had good roads, good schools, good jobs – even for those without a college degree – and a certain insular cockiness that somehow refuses to be quelled, even today.

Sure, there were other recessions in the 70s and 80s, but those were temporary slumps, unpleasant hiccups in the automotive life cycle, nothing we hardy Michiganders couldn’t ride out until better times arrived again.

But things change. If I’ve learned anything in the past 15 years, it’s that. When life’s good, you enjoy it, maybe even overindulge a bit, bingeing on the pleasure of long hot days and sultry evenings by the grill with your man and your dog and a nice bottle of Pinot Noir that reminds you of your recent Napa trip and how much fun it was and how big the world always seems when you’re traveling.

And when it shifts, when the breeze picks up and the leaves begin their annual metamorphosis from verdant emerald to a crazy quilt of scarlet, flame, and gold, you enjoy it then, too. You savor the new season as a time for reflection, long sleeves, and apple cider fresh from the mill, served with cinnamon sugar-sprinkled donuts piping hot in a brown paper bag for you to bring home to share. You scuff your toes through the leaf piles clustered haphazardly together on the sidewalk as you walk your faithful sweet pup in the twilight and feel giddy with girlishness, recalling the days before mortgages and work and grownup worries, when time seemed to stretch out forever in one great big uninterrupted dull yawn.

Above all, you know, with the scars and the triumphs and the heartbreaks of accumulated living to prove it, that the weather will transform itself once more before too long. Whether torrential downpours one day or fierce snowstorms the next, from cloudless January mornings when the sky is a frozen azure pond and your face hurts and your fingers tingle from the cold, to fresh spring afternoons filled with blossoms and the scent of loamy, fertile wet dirt alive with possibility, it’s all temporary, really.

You change as well, from a quiet, sheltered girl with glasses and braces and an unflattering tight perm, unsure of herself and afraid to question the status quo, to a coltish young woman, testing her boundaries with aggression, defiance, high heels, and short skirts. No rules for her, never mind the consequences.

Later, you change again. You find your center the hard way, after you’ve hurt others through your actions and careless words and been hurt yourself, after you realize it’s up to you to set the course for your own life without guilt or shame or crippling fear.

Over time, you learn to live with what comes your way, no matter what, to find peace and beauty in each season. You find opportunities to savor the joys while they last but not hold on too tightly, and you remind yourself to breathe through the tough times, grounded in the rough-hewn truth that this, too, shall pass.

You remember yourself at 24, wide-eyed and hopeful, sitting in the medieval Italian splendor of Siena’s Piazza del Campo, marveling at your good fortune and the excitement of knowing your whole life lay before you like a gift. And you remember yourself after that, when the trip was over, when the classes were finished and your law school friends had all gone off to live their lives in places like New York and San Francisco and London. You remember every aspect of that tiny, damp basement apartment where the bills piled up and you sat frozen and utterly lost for months, lonely and despondent, without the first clue as to what to do next.

You still wonder sometimes how you got through it, those long years before you clawed your way back from the darkness into something resembling calm and the life you’ve built today. You know now that you are strong, that you will survive, that you are grateful for the journey.

And when October visits again, with her football games and bonfires and homecoming dances, you smile during the short jaunt from the porch to the driveway and back again, as you pass by the tomato plants in their terra cotta pots offering you the last fruits of their bounty. You smile, yes, you do, and you thank her for all that she brings you.