Falling

It took them four hours, but this entire pile and more made it to the back yard.

So we're rushing toward Halloween, costumes ready, pumpkins grown and picked, pumpkin lights up. Ordinarily this is one of my favorite months. Warm days, cool nights, perfect conditions for training the children in quasi-agricultural labor, which as everyone from Agricola on knows is the best possible thing for their little characters (now if we could also encourage them to engage in that labor outside the home, i.e., on someone else's payroll, we'd be gold. As it is I'm out $30 bucks after a particularly vigorous bout of weekend Helping.) The kids are doing well--it's kind of a golden year for both of them, possibly the last one ever (at least that will occur in tandem). After all, Si starts Middle School next year. Life as a nuclear family will only go down from here.

It was our anniversary last week (fifteen years!). We spent it as couples at a certain life stage do, which is to say wedged into tiny plastic chairs at a school function:

M, at least, got to stretch his legs a bit.

It was also the anniversary of this:

That tree is really one of the best aspects of the neighborhood.

See? Still looks good, with 100% less noxious drywall dust.

Life is good, and yet Life, she is kicking my rear end to the curb. I am spending these idyllic fall days either weighed to the ground with trepidation and sadness or gliding along in a haze of denial: my mother is sick. This is as much as I want to say, because this thing that is happening is her private event and I have a feeling if I say anything it will flop awkwardly over into the realm of saying too much. So to summarize: the color of this fall is grief. I am alternately prostrate and hopeful, as are we all. Well, except the kids. They are still, and hopefully will get to remain, delightfully oblivious that anything bad could happen to the people they love.