autumn | Greta McDonough

In some ways it is the 1970s all over again. Not the fashions, which is a blessing, nor the home furnishings, also a blessing. But in other, sweeter ways, it is as if my friends and I never left high school. Or rather, it is as if we are still in high school, but we are nicer now, kinder. How we might have been then, but without the angst and hormones, the striving and insecurities.

Our complexions have cleared up but there are other issues to take the place of bad skin. Well, actually, it is still bad skin. Crepe and wrinkles and those pesky annual trips to the dermatologist. Back in the day it was tetracycline and sulfury creams. Now, it is cryotherapy and biopsies, as we pay for all that sunbathing with baby oil. But still. The same.

In the past month I have seen or been with most of my girls on the regular. One pal who has moved away was in town for a quick forty-eight hours, but enough time for a lunch date, and Nancy and Tony drove down from Louisville early so they could join us, ahead of a football game in Bowling Green. They all came over to my house, clamored up the stepladder to my new addition to offer congratulations and suggestions.

This past weekend it was “Voices of Elmwood” and a bunch of us huddled together on the wagon, our systems shocked by the first cold evening, and we thumped along cracking wise like we always have. But quietly, not in the obnoxious way of our youth. We were a model audience, with only a whispered bon mot now and then.

Nancy was in town for just the afternoon because her husband, Tony, and Drew, their son, were playing golf with Woody. She hung out with me and Ruth Ann and we had lunch and a tour of Ruth Ann’s new home. And then, Ruth Ann and the girls and I went to dinner a few hours later as we waited for our Elmwood tour to start. We all ended up back at Ruth Ann’s for dessert.

In this way we haven’t changed. We travel on our stomachs, we make sure we pace ourselves but we never miss a meal, ever.

It seemed so easy. I didn’t mind Nancy seeing the mess I have created in my house as I sat overwhelmed and anxious for the new work to be completed. We looked at sofas on line, we discussed the attributes of loose back cushions and those attached, we gagged at some of the colors on offer.

We talked about Julie and her recent trip down the Danube. I had sent her some of my best Prague and Budapest tips before she left. Then, because now it was on my mind, I sent her more as things occurred to me after she departed. In this way, I was hanging out with her while she was hanging out with her husband and their friends floating along in Europe. Another childhood connection made and maintained.

I can take little credit for our group getting together. Because that is what it is, a coming back together, not that we have stayed together. Sure, we have kept up with births and deaths and other big events over the years, but now it seems we are in each other’s lives again. Margaret decided we needed to get away for a weekend eight years ago, and we so we have continued it. And it is a wonderful feeling.

We are far-flung, some of us, but we burn up the WhatsApp chat, and it seems we have relearned each other, but so much easier this time around, helped by a shorthand decades old.

We used to swap job news, kid news, and complain about how exhausted we were on those rare times we might catch up, usually in Owensboro and around some holiday or another. Meals taken in a McDonald’s with a Play Place, a stop between family obligations on those quick trips home to see parents. Now, we drive two hours just for lunch, and think nothing of it. Now we talk about our health, of course, but also books, and what seems to occupy everyone–what to stream next on Netflix, or AppleTV.

All weekend I had this warm little place inside, nothing too giddy, but nice, and I thought it must be the weather. Now I think it was this: fall, yes, but fall with friends.

He is very proud of his hands, my young colleague, who stops by my office on a regular basis. He comes at my calling when I am stuck, as I am so often, when I attempt to navigate the platform upon which we teach on-line classes.

Jason is one of the experts, and he doesn’t so much tell me what I’ve done wrong as he commandeers my office chair and, like Merlin with silent incantations and divinations, fixes my mess while I play around on the iPhone.

Last week he was proud of his hands. They were calloused. He presented them to me, palms up, when I asked how things were going, what he’d been up to. “This is what I have been doing”, he said, as if a quick glance at his hands was all the information I needed. He has been preparing his yard for winter, reseeding, aerating the ground, digging and raking and I am not sure what all. His calloused and blistered palms mark him as more than one of the men of the great indoors, and that is how he likes it.

My own yard could use some tidying up before fall sets in, but I neglect it with purpose, and I don’t know why. The flowers in my little English border are cranky and overly physical, the bully Lantana overwhelming her delicate neighbors. The garden phlox is spent, but hangs on like a beaten but determined boxer, all heart, with their battered heads drooping onto their chests.

The chickweed and spurge have so completely integrated with my annuals that I quit pulling them out and treat them like filler, the baby’s breath in a bouquet. Broadleaf plantain climbs my capitata yews and I wince and work to convince myself that, really, it might be considered an ornamental. The impatiens are leggy, the gerbers dead on their feet, and my geraniums, which I have hopes of overwintering, have gone on a hunger strike or some such nonsense, and look quite dreadful.

Blooming comes late to my yard. The tomatoes show up later than my friends’ tomatoes, regardless of how early I plant them. My pal, Alice, had pulled up her moon vine before mine deigned to join us topside to put on a show. I use this excuse to be in no hurry to clean up my garden, but really, I think it is sloth.

Then, too, there is also something about pulling up living things, even though they have lost their vigor, will no longer produce. If a plant isn’t brown and rattly, I just can’t get rid of it. Even when I am sick of looking at it. I always think, just one more weekend and I will make ten gallons of pesto before I yank the basil. Just half an hour tomorrow and I will harvest the parsley, freeze it for winter, so as to astonish my guests with the freshness of my lasagne deep in winter.

But those days come and go with no action and my yard looks like it needs a visit from the city. Or maybe it is the finality of the thing that gets me. Once I clean up my garden I won’t smell dirt again for seven months. I will miss that.

Then, too, the best part of porch life is all the green, in every direction, shot through with red, and pink, purple and yellow. An autumn porch is nice, but brittle in its way.

There are times I wish I were a poet, because I admire them beyond all reason. Just as I sat down to think about this, a poem came across my desk that I wish I had the talent to write. In her poem, “Lines Written In the Days of Growing Darkness,” Mary Oliver has said with such economy and grace that with which I fumble. She gives us this these bookends, with such loveliness in between.

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that it may resume…

…So let us go on

through the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

We need our poets most in autumn, I think, to see us through the winter.

Greta McDonough

Tag Archives: autumn

FALL, WITH FRIENDS

Fall Garden

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