Tag Archives: Autumn

Courage at Twilight: Blessed Art Thou

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The bushes are rounded, the water drained from the coiled garden hoses. The witches and scarecrows have moved into the dark basement, while the pilgrim couple watches the neighborhood from the front porch.  The first snow fell before the leaves fell, and now the leaves have fallen, too.  I raked mounds of big yellow sweet gum leaves from the gutter and across the sidewalk onto the lawn, as Dad wished, so he could vacuum them up with the riding mower.  But the piles of leaves were much too deep for the mower.  Advancing along the sidewalk, I raked the leaves into a neat windrow, as if for bailing, like hay, and each sweep of leaves onto the windrow rustled with the sound of small waves cresting and falling to lap gently at wet sand on a beach.  I could hear the ocean in the raking of five-pointed leaves.  The truth is, I expect God to bless me.  I believe in his generosity.  I believe in his intention to enrich my life, even if with adversity.  I believe he will bless every human being with exactly those blessings that human needs in each moment for that human’s spiritual progress to the extent of that human’s willingness and ability to receive.  The arrival of providence does not bring an accompanying ease, but rather an urgent invitation to be more than we have been.  I believe that as I search for opportunities to enrich the lives of others, those opportunities will be provided, enriching my life in return.  I believe God wants me and my children and all his human children to succeed, and will help us as we allow.  Success, of course, as he defines, not as I define.  He may bless me with hardship (he will bless me with hardship) just as he will bless me to grow through and heal from hardship, improving and ennobling in the process.  I am learning that God is trustworthy.  And I am learning, so slowly, to listen to his voice as he instructs me and guides me to love and to forgive and to serve.  I hear his voice in the raking windrows of sweetgum leaves.  And I left plenty of loose leaves to be sucked up by the lawn mower Dad managed to clamber onto and ride triumphantly and humbly across the lawn for the last time this year.

Courage at Twilight: Witch Season

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My relative mood seems tied directly to Dad’s relative strength, and today has been his weakest in the eight days since his homecoming, too reminiscent of pre-hospital days, days of barely standing and of barely walking and of legs quivering. “Up up up!” I commanded, using physical therapy’s compulsory three-times repetition (is that diacope, palilalia, or anaphora?).  Straighten your legs.  Pull your butt in.  Chest out.  Chin up.  All this harassment to make standing and walking as safe and easy as possible.  Leaning over a walker is never safe, for the walker can run away, leaving its master behind on the floor.  My spirits had sunk with his sinking strength.  But Jeanette and I pushed Mom in her wheelchair as Dad motored himself very slowly down the street—until I showed him how to switch from “slow” to “moderate” (there is no “fast” in a power wheelchair), allowing us to walk along at a normal pace.  The Wasatch mountains looked powerfully but benignly down upon us, boasting a vast patched skirt of oranges and reds from the gambel oaks and mountain maples transitioning toward winter.  And Mom and I assembled and painted our witch craft kits—all cute and no scary—I added no warts but mere freckles to her nose—and added them to the decorated front porch, along with a witch’s broom I fortuitously forgot to put away yesterday, and purple mums, and pumpkins newly painted by Jeanette and Amy, next to the wheelchair ramps now stained and sealed as well as sturdy.  And we sat on the back patio in the cool evening air, so pleasant on the skin, discussing already our traditional family Christmas Eve gathering, the shadow of the sinking sun climbing up the mountain’s skirt, the vibrancy of red and orange leaves delighting in matching sunset hues, both fading now to the subdued, the sleepy.