After the Fall

Back to mud season.  Rain, grunge, tracks in the house.  Not that housekeeping rules my life.  We keep an uneasy truce much of the time.  The house minds it's business, I mind mine.  But even a dirtbag housekeeper like me can only ignore so much.  Mud season.  It is a usual time for my juggling balls to hit the ground, splat.  My son's education, my career, outdoor adventures, fitness, creativity.  Splat.  It is the darkening of the year, cold and wet.  Summer and Fall glory are fading and the glittering season of Winter has not begun.  An in-between place.  A place of uneasy rest.  And some good tickles.  Alex and I have been playing let's-hide-under-the-quilts-and-have-tickle-fights quite a lot lately.  Such a cozy place to be, especially when still in pj's after the initial bathroom runs.  Then again after lunch when we're dressed and bored.  Again in the evening when postponing the bed time routine.  Warm, dark, cozy, comfortable.  He has absoluetly no fear of the dark, and likes to block out all light under the covers.  Then he will tunnel to the end of the bed like a mole.  It's a riot.  A perfect game for these times.  Thank the Lord for goose down, even as I feel sorry for those birds.  A guilty pleasure.  Now is also a good time for cooking.  Some of my 44 pounds of green tomatoes have turned into bonafide veggies, and I have a glorious tomato sauce in the fridge.  More like tomato soup actually, all velvety and smooth.   Tomatoes grown out in the sun and the wind, under the giant sky, chopped and simmered down into one pot and plunked in the fridge.  A concentrating and distilling down.  That is what this time of year seems to be.  A bit melancholy, and more so this year.  A year since we lost our most wonderful dog.  A time when friends and loved ones lost also come easily to mind.  Summer gone, winter coming, the earth in between breaths.

I feel a bit like the grasshopper juxtaposed with the ant.  Oh-oh, winter's coming and only my fiddle is in tune.  But much as I try I will never be an ant.  This is why I try to keep my life simple.  I do not have the routines and habits to support more stuff.  In fact I want to free myself of more stuff.  Clear out the composting items (only metaphorically speaking, I swear) and get down to the really necessary.  Less things to clean the mud off.  Two billion people on this earth live on less that two dollars a day.  I think I can do better.  All I need is a warm house.   And a few clothes.  And my outdoor gear.  And food of course, and my books.  Let's not forget indoor plumbing.  Art supplies are good.  So are my radios.  Gotta keep the two vehicles (well, not really but...) and the washer and dryer are key.  Maybe I can get rid of the pine-cone collection?  But not my rocks.  Or pets!  Hmmm.  Maybe just the mud.

But really, it's all good enough.  Kevin is very busy and business is doing well.  Alex still loves his school.  He now has a new job of calling out the bus numbers for kids to line up at the end of the day.  I got a call from one of the mom's who picks her daughter up, telling me what a wonderful job he does.  And I had tea with his aide last week.  Two and a half hours of sharing about Alex, in both directions.  It was delightful.  She is a grandma and just a marvelous woman.  He is starting to really connect with emotions now, his world is opening up and coloring.  At home we talk about many things, and at school he is learning every day.  He cried and cried at school over a story about a girl who flew out the window and over her town, he could not talk about why.  He told Miss Trudie, "I look out my window and try to fly, but I can't..." and cried some more.  Last year, when Lucky died we told him how she flew up to heaven.  Now he is getting words and images for that sadness, and that is a very good thing.  It is sometimes trying, as emotions leak all over every day happenings, but it was much worse for them to be so deep and impossible to understand.    They say that kids with autism do not have much emotion, and that is so untrue.  What is true is they are often locked off in their own well, with no connection to the processing and logic part of the brain, so that they can only be in one part or the other.   With little or no communication between the two and no understanding of how to corral and control emotion.  Better to just seal that area off.  But you can't.  And then when these kids fall in the well, it is so hard to get out.  Tantrums, head banging, lashing out at others.   Endless fear or rage or sadness.  Until they escape, and leave all those impossible emotions behind, sealed off again and avoided.  Little by little, we are connecting the two, and this will be our biggest job for the next several years.  We get the brunt of this work, and that is fine.  At school he is happy and joy filled.  He is impressing them with his memory and love of academic skills.  And the kids seem to really like him, even if they don't get why he is so quirky.  He still can't converse in kid language, and his attention span and fidgetyness keep him on the move during class.  But with continued work it will all come around.

So things may be muddy and dark, but the world keeps on spinning.  The end of one adventure becomes the beginning of another, as long as you're living in a circle and not a straight line.  I think it is time to go for a run with the new dog... in the mud.  C-ya!