A neighbor paints her house turquoise with salmon and forest-green accents. The colors are up for discussion on our short dead-end street; myself, I love this blue and speculate how cool it would be to transform our houses in a Vermont village version of San Francisco’s Painted Ladies.

Mid-August (already?!), rain has ceased. Our lawns are all cropped short and no one’s mowing. Late afternoon, watering the perennials I planted this summer, I eat sun gold tomatoes in the garden, the sandy loam warm beneath my feet. This summer, endeavoring to heal from lymphoma and surgery, I retreated into my garden, writing, walking. Pay attention, I cautioned myself. Take time to visit my neighbors and talk about shades of blue.

Survive cancer (and cancer treatment), and you discover the world has the same facts (the electric and property tax bills, the need for steady income, spilled oatmeal in an upper kitchen cabinet, a hole in the chimney that needs repointing; these chores jostle on my post-it lists) and the questions that muse through my mind in yoga practice and wick away (why?: an apple tree shedding leaves, a clandestine coffee klatch, my recurring expectation that I may see my dead mother around street corners….)

Vermont’s radiant summer rolls into balmy autumn. The rain may commence at any moment, or might hold off until snow and sleet. The winter will be whatever it will be. In my own realm, I soak up this end-of-summer stillness, water the new transplants, wake each morning, yet alive. A low bar, or, conversely, the highest I’ve set for myself yet.

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that. ~ Galway Kinnell