Shades of October

The approaching end of October gathers speed. The leaves on the trees continue to change color only to quickly find a new home on the ground. Once any existing fog rises in the morning, the sky usually explodes into a brilliant deep blue words can’t quite describe properly while the sun emerges from the horizon in a yellow-orange super-sized circle. The cool air in the morning lingers later and later into each passing day clearly signaling a change of season.

Another October is here, and now, like the leaves on those trees outside, is about to go away. What is it about October that almost always leaves me considering it’s merits more than any other month? October seems to be one of those months I can’t quite figure out and I'm not sure why.

Good things reside in October. My dad’s birthday is in October. He shares his birthday with his great grandson, Conner. Watching those two together, especially on their shared birth date, is truly one of life’s great joys. Conner’s mom, my niece, Carrie, has an anniversary with her husband, Russell, in October. My dear grandmother, Carrie’s namesake, celebrated her birthday on the 31^st of October. October also finds college football in full swing and the rivalry games all kick in during October making the good-natured ribbing between friends something to enjoy when your team wins and something to endure when your team loses. The change in weather is also a welcome relief from the usual four or five months of a hot summer.

At the same time though, it’s sad to look around and notice the green leaves and grass are giving way to less vibrant colors. A sudden wind can be a reminder that much colder weather waits and may hang around for longer than the last puff of wind that just blew by. I also always remember my grandfather died in October. His death was the first death I really understood. Understood is not the right word. I still don’t fully understand death. What I mean is he was the first person I had known who died. His death, and the realization we are all mortal, sticks with me thirty plus years down the road.

Maybe it’s because my job runs me hard from June until September and October is that moment when my running can slow down so I can regain my feet underneath me that allows me to give pause to October. Maybe it’s knowing that Thanksgiving and Christmas and a few dozen other important things have to be done in the sixty or so days after October ends that makes me consider October like I do.

So it comes down to a month of unfulfilled reflection and then at the very end of the month comes Halloween. At Halloween, Jennifer and I pass out candy to neighborhood kids, some too young to have any idea what the fuss is about, others who will stockpile their candy like a squirrel would hoard nuts for the winter and still others who should probably consider staying home next year to study for the SAT. Dressed-up strangers and neighbors ring our doorbell and ask for candy, so we willingly oblige.

Eventually, the last trick-or-treater will step off our porch and out into the yard crunching the leaves which have fallen during the week. The porch light will remain burning for a few more minutes before one of us determines this social aspect of Halloween is over. The candle lighting up the jack-o-lantern will be blown out. I will find the leftover candy and rummage through it as if I were looking for a long-sought-after treasure or like I were looking for answers on how to better understand October. Outside the moon will rise high in the black sky and the fog will quietly crawl in from October's shades.

And then tomorrow, November will arrive.

Smoke

I picked up my gray hoodie from the laundry pile. It needed a good washing after the weekend. My nose though honed in on the smell of smoke, which had permeated the cotton garment.

Smoke often isn’t a friendly smell…out-of-control blazes, cigarettes, a burned food product still resting in a toaster oven; those types of things usually don’t house good thoughts. This smoky smell though was different. It was the smell of a deliberately set, controlled fire from Saturday night at our family reunion.

My brother had built a fire pit and most of us sat around it for at least a little while and warmed ourselves from the cool air of a north Georgia October night. We roasted marshmallows and made Smores and talked and laughed. We gazed at the sky wondering how many stars God had placed on display for our viewing on this particular night. Other times we caught each other staring hypnotically at the flames wrapping its fingers around the logs, lost in our own thoughts, oblivious for a brief time to the chatter of others and the crack, snap and pop of the fire itself, and, to the world at large.

It was a great weekend. Yes, Saturday’s wind was sharp and felt more like December than October. We won’t remember that though when we think back at this weekend or review the photos from then. We’ll remember those kids running without abandon kicking the soccer balls and the games of horseshoes and croquet and Facts in Five. We’ll think about the BBQ, the stew, the spaghetti, the cakes. We’ll cherish holding the newborns, trying to get them to burp or smile and feeling a sense of accomplishment when we can get them to do one or the other but never both. We’ll laugh at the family photo remembering the efforts it took to get everyone to stand still and smile for just a few seconds. We’ll recall the piñata that took a beating and kept on swinging. We’ll secretly lament how we can’t keep the little ones from growing up and knowing hurt and pain and how we can’t protect our older family members from growing any older and knowing any more hurt and pain as well. We won’t remember the chill of the wind but what will linger will be the warmth we found with our family.

Now, this load of laundry must find it’s way to the washing machine. Soon, the gray hoodie will be overwhelmed by water and some sweet-smelling detergent designed to make the garment smell different than it does now, you know, like lilacs in springtime or like an ocean breeze in summer. With the washing, the hoodie will lose the faint smell of smoke from Saturday night’s fire.

As we left the reunion late Sunday afternoon, I noticed someone had stirred the ashes around in the fire pit. In the glare of the sun, a small flame had found enough air to find life. From those ashes, a puff of smoke rose and I stopped long enough to take a deep breath of the sweet smell of smoke.

And today, that smell of smoke lingers, my, how it lingers.

Front porch

Early Saturday I stepped outside to retrieve the paper. The sun had yet to appear from the east. The morning was still draped in a slow-to-disappear dark cover. The air was fresh. The temperature was just cool enough to finish waking me up. The wind softly rippled the chimes at the end of the porch. No cars were on the street. The only intrusive sound was a dog barking a few houses away. It was a moment of tranquility before the day really started. Before I made the trek down the front steps and the walkway and down the driveway to where the paper carrier had tossed the paper, I stopped at the top step of our porch.

In that brief moment, I went back to my maternal grandparent’s front porch.

My grandparents lived in a large house with giant oak trees scattered throughout a very large yard. Their large, white house was trimmed in red and was surrounded by a porch that wrapped around about half the house. At yard level was a small gate that opened onto the porch. The porch then inched higher off the ground as it stretched down the side of the house facing the road and around the corner to the back of the house. Red palings traveled the same path and kept all of us from the porch’s edge.

Most every Sunday we would visit my grandparents. You never knew who would be there, local aunts, uncles and cousins or even aunts, uncles and cousins from the big, ol’ city of Atlanta. A baseball or football game might break out in the yard. In the spring, we might get into a crabapple fight or in the fall, an acorn fight. On the porch, the adults discussed religion, politics, NASCAR, pro wrestling, recipes, work, music, TV shows, hair styles, clothes, and, no doubt, now and then, some family members not present at that very moment. It was the social scene for my family most Sunday afternoons. It is where we connected as a family.

After my grandfather passed away and time moved on, the porch became my grandmother’s safe place. You could drive by there and as long as the weather was warm enough for her you could find her in her big brown chair on the porch. As we all grew older and apart from one another, you could always count on my grandmother sitting on her porch even though many of us didn’t get to visit her on the porch as often as we could have or should have.

In cold weather, my grandmother retreated to her living room but anxiously waited for warmer weather. And who could blame her? Even in the hottest summers, the porch there was cool with the breeze and shade provided by the giant oak trees. From her vantage point, my grandmother could look up and down the road. It was an ideal place. Looking back, maybe being there reminded her of earlier times when the porch was filled with laughter and company and times she missed.

Our porch has white palings which touch the corners of our porch stretching around the front of the house only to be separated by an opening for the front steps. Two white rockers sit on the morning sun side of the porch while a swing hangs near the other end. While our front porch hasn’t been as busy as the porch of my grandparents, it has served to be a place where we have entertained family and friends. It’s been a place where she and I have tackled important issues we faced. Sometimes, it’s a place where I sit and talk on the phone. I have even dragged a laptop there and worked from home. On some occasions, I find myself there pleading with the cat to come inside and stop her menacing glances at the neighbor’s cat. And sometimes, I just find myself there missing another porch from another time, miles away from here, yet close enough to still revisit in my heart from time to time.

Rain

Sometime during the night our power went off. This morning all our clocks were flashing with the incorrect time. By the time I wake up enough to know the world is waiting outside, I’m already late. The radio traffic report says there is an accident about two miles from our house on my way to work and to be careful because the streets are wet with rain. When I enter the bathroom I notice Jennifer, my wife, has left her cell phone on a counter. I call work to let them know I’ll be a few minutes late but instead of a live human being, I get voice mail. To top it all off, my head hurts, mostly due to allergy season.

This day is getting off to a great start.

On my way to work I slow down because of the wet streets. My tires are getting older and I don’t want my precious truck to slide all over the place. Meantime, others zip around me as if Mr. Magoo had accidently driven onto the track during the Daytona 500. At work, traffic is thick. The three lanes into work are bumper-to-bumper as we all try to jockey into the correct lane before it’s too late and we end up in a parking lot where we have never parked before. Finally, my parking lot is within sight. Due to my lateness, I cannot tell whether or not there is an empty space left. There is. A few hours later though I return here in the rain, without my umbrella, to make sure I had turned my lights off.

Once at my desk I spend a good half hour trying to get my email to open and then another half hour or so trying to diagnose and fix the problem. No matter what I do I have no success. My comfort level, disguised now in the form of quiet panic, begins to crash. No computer? What will I do? Can I actually do my job anymore? How will those who need to communicate with me feel when I don’t return their email promptly?

Of course there are workarounds. While the good folks in computer services take control of my computer, I get out my tablet PC and decide to fire it up. I can get to the same places on it as I can on my big old honking desktop. As I plug in various cords and cables and turn the tablet PC on, I glance out my office window and something catches my eye. Slow down I tell myself. Look at that. I then realize all morning I have yet to really grasp that it’s raining. It’s been right there around me all along but I have yet to really appreciate the rain. It’s been weeks since the last significant rainfall in our area and this morning the rain is falling from the sky like God has turned a bucket upside down.

I gaze out my office window. I see the tops of a handful of trees between my building and the next building. Raindrops bounce off the leaves of the trees. Now and then a stray raindrop sticks to my window. I hear my tablet PC whizzing and know it’s ready for me to go to work. It’ll wait another minute or so though so I can linger at the window and watch the rain fall. I then realize my headache is gone and that I made it safely to work and that Jennifer will survive without her cell phone and that I’ll soon be able to do my job and that the clocks I left flashing at home will still be there at the end of the day for me to reset. I can handle that today.

Riding the Brakes

The song says life is a highway. That seems an appropriate metaphor in today’s world, fast-paced, always on the move, foot on the gas pedal, gas pedal to the floor, always looking for a cheaper way to refuel to keep going, and always trying to get to some destination…just so you can do it all over again later.

Thinking in those terms makes life seem like some endless cycle or to keep our metaphors on the same road, like an endless black ribbon (shameful plug to an old country song). Either way you wish to describe the journey, you don’t have to be out there on life’s road long before you realize you cannot easily pull off the side of the road and quit moving on.

So , what keeps us moving on? Urgency sometimes motivates us to get to certain places but is that really why we keep on down that highway every day? To me, it seems what keeps most of us moving on is usually the destination or the company we keep along the way. Let me try to explain.

Recently, my wife, Jennifer, and I traveled to the Gulf Coast for a vacation. It’s an eight hour or so drive. Obviously, the drive was so much nicer having Jennifer along so we could talk and laugh and so she could gasp a few times at my questionable driving skills. Ultimately, though, the whole trip was all about the destination. We understood this clearly the minute our feet sunk deep into the white sand while the wind stirred just enough to slightly run its fingers through our hair. At that moment that long eight hour drive including the traffic jam between Birmingham and Montgomery, the thump-diddy-dum of the pavement and the cramped-up sense you get riding for an extended time in a car simply faded away just beyond where our eyes could no longer see past the ocean’s horizon.

Other times it’s the company we keep that keep us moving along. One summer years ago, when we were all much younger, my niece Jill came to visit my mom, dad and me for a week. At the end of the week we drove Jill back to her home in South Carolina. I’m not sure how old I was then, although I was old enough to drive which would make Jill a pre-teen or teenager. Somewhere during the trip, I was charged with driving. As we barrel down a road in rural South Carolina around midday I notice a woman walking along her driveway after retrieving her mail. This woman was decked out in her nightgown, house shoes and topped the whole look off with a crown of hair rollers. My mom, dad and Jill all locked eyes on her at about the same time. Without missing a beat, I began blowing the car horn and waving as if this woman was our neighbor. Not missing a beat herself, the woman turned and waved at us as if we were long-lost family. Needless to say, all of us in the car broke out in laughter that lasted several miles. Years ago, that moment made a long road trip seem a bit shorter. Now it brings back good memories of laughing with family. Whenever I travel that stretch of highway in South Carolina even today I can’t help but smile when I drive through there remembering that brief moment from years before. Somehow it makes things just a bit more tolerable.

The purpose, at least initially, of this blog, is to take a few moments and enjoy the things that might get missed otherwise. It’s the modern day version of stop and smell the roses. So, if life is a highway and getting on that highway is inevitable I am suggesting now and then along the way to ride the brakes a bit. Slow down. Enjoy the ride. Don’t miss the scenery and the company along the way. You’ll get to that destination eventually and then it’ll soon enough be time to get back out on the road.