I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost