377 Days - Blog #72 - simplicity of an October day

So I got home ten minutes ago and decided – randomly – to walk about my yard and see what color has bled into the leaves – or fallen onto the ground as some recent stormy air might have caused.  I resolved to take these last golden hours of daylight to sit on my back porch that has been abandoned all summer in anticipation of repairs that will finally start next week.  

The crickets are still whistling all around me.  Although I hear a tractor on the neighbor property… and yes, I can see the reflection of its metal moving between the still crowded tapestry of leaves.  The air is sweet with that delicious decay that October brings.  The maples and oaks all around me are golden… or at least seem so as the setting sun peers between their trunks.

It is mild.  A glorious evening for a day that was supposed to be a washout.  It is everything – even as I sigh at the warped door of this porch and its wasted opportunity this summer – that is what makes living in this house, on this property, in this teeny town in the middle of Massachusetts so totally worth it.

And I take a sip of wine.

This is what the present feels like.  Not whirring by.  Not drowned out with the sound of my eclectic Pandora shuffle.    

I have an idea for this porch.  Maybe we can add it to the list.  I had given some thought to a daisy on the house exterior, like my cousin painted for my grandmother on the back of her garage.  Maybe I’ll still do that.  But after it is fixed up for the rest of the fall (maybe mild enough for a November write-in) and in anticipation for the spring and summer, I think I would like it to be a writers’ porch.  Instead of a mural, I’ll paint a backdrop for guests to write a line or favorite quote on the clapboards.  Maybe just chalkboard paint and some chalk… but I have a little while to figure it out.

It’s amazing what stopping to breathe in the present does for the imagination.

I think it is easy with the idea of this list – this blog – to always be thinking about what is yet to be done, breathed, lived, seen.  But now is just as good as any other moment.

Although the day started out with a sort of presence in the now.

The wind woke me.  I always keep my bedside clock ahead some illogical amount of minutes.  I think it was around 5:30.  The wind was dramatic.  I had one window open and appreciated the air and the lulling sound of the shifting trees.  There was also lightening that may have kept me awake to notice lest it got too scary.  But I would close my eyes and remember the lunar eclipse that was on its way.  I can’t say I saw it.  I did open my eyes again and it was dark.  Really dark.  Dark in the way the woods can be – especially after knowing how bright the woods can be in the shadow of a full moon (I almost wrote fool moon - Twelfth Night on the brain).  But as I waited for the tumultuous breezes to pass, I thought about that pagan lore of full moons and a lunar eclipse and the winds shifting.  Change is in the air.

If I let it be.

If I let it go.

And maybe realizing that is just as simple as sitting here as the sun goes down, listening to the tractor doing laps, and savoring a few sips of Malbec.