A Mixed Delight.

All week, we say to each other, This might be the last nice day or Only a few good days left, as if our Shire-ish Vermont realm teeters on the brink of disappearance. Not so, of course.

I leave work early and disappear into the town forest, stepping off the main trails which suddenly seem populated, and hurry down the narrow bike paths, picking up speed and running in my shoes that I’ve meant to replace with their torn toes and worn soles. Add that chore to the list of the mundane: clean the upstairs closet, shake out the living room rug, replace the burned-out lightbulb over the bathroom sink.

October is a hard reckoning month in Vermont, the sizing up of the summer (not enough swimming, surely not enough sunlight) and the letting go of gardening as winter edges in, steadily, inexorably. I rake leaves, mulch the garden, put away my shovel and hoe.

For years, I canned crazily, hundreds of jars of beans and tomatoes and apples. This year, the mainstay of my garden is flowers. Months ago, the flowers gained the upper hand, and I can scarcely pick my way through the tangle of vine and petal: a patch of succor for pollinators, slow moving now, and birds.

My mother asks what’s new, what’s happening: skeins of geese fly over our house. Like the skeins of yarn I unwind and then rewind into fat balls. Sprawled on the windowsill beside my desk, my cat studies a gray squirrel fattening its cheeks with sunflower seeds. Red, gold, green: autumn.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. 

— Jack Gilbert