Seasons: FALL

I’m writing about seasons.  I’m writing about ghosts.  This is the first in a series.

Indian Summer Saturday blossomed on our farm hilltop. Gold flickered up from the bristling corn stalks. They crackled and shimmered in the breeze. It was a glorious day.  We were  working.

The barn was dreary and dusty.  We had to focus on the job at hand: boxes upon boxes of office supplies, files, desks, cabinets, typewriters. Dust upon nasty dust consumed us on this downsizing Saturday.

A hillside fire was ablaze with discarded items. We emptied drawers.  I noticed the pile.  Brad had kept them:  Love letters. Ghosts.  Remembrances.

Brad and I were weary and crabby.  We don’t work well together.  Two managers: a dangerous combination.  

Brad plopped into his lawn chair: a fireside monitoring station.  I kneeled down on the grassy slope and dumped the drawer.  Love notes fluttered out like confetti.

Blue, yellow, pink -white envelopes with long addresses and “Personal” marked across the  front scattered on the ground.  —Thirty plus years of love notes.  Brad had kept them in his desk drawer. -Who’d have thought?

For you, my friends, who are “seasoned” couples, long since acquainted and quietly comfortable, love notes aren’t on your radar.  They sure aren’t on ours.  But there, in a flowery pile at my feet, lay my heart.  I had to share.  I grabbed a few and began to read aloud.

Brad didn’t stir from his fireman’s throne.  I read on. He remained silent. 

“I haven’t changed, you know,” I finally said to Brad as I brushed a gray hair from my forehead.  Then I said in a quiet murmur (not my usual tone),  “I still love you so much.”

“Oh, Laurie,” Brad said with a weary and worn sigh, tossing a stick into the flames.

My husband and I: a Fall Couple of 36 years,  sat quietly side-by side in the Indian Summer afternoon. He remained in his chair, I relaxed on the ground. We gazed at the fire which lapped up the last remnants of old furniture, business papers, envelopes and trash. 

We didn’t add the love notes to the fire.  We sat there and savored them.

Indian summer Saturday was our last touch of warmth before the cold closed in.  Brad and I had work to do.   

For a shimmering moment, however, We savored a day and a pile of love notes. Both were warm and golden.

Brad and I are in our Fall season, but, like our fire, like our Indian Summer, like our love notes, we are, first and forever, wrapped in the warmth of love.