The first frost of the season glittered across the roof tops outside my window this morning. A reminder winter is creeping closer with every rotation of the earth.
The San Francisco Bay Area reacts to this like a child snuggling under heavy quilts demanding another hour of slumber before being dragged into the weak light of day. And when we finally extract ourselves from our cocoons, the nip of cold brushes across our bare cheeks and tweaks the tips of our noses and ears. It’s a gentle scolding, warning of harsher temperatures to come when bands of storms arrive on our doorsteps like shirt-tail relatives from Alaska bringing carpet bags full of icy rain that freezes the blood and leaves our shoes in a perpetual state of unpleasant dampness.
Autumn is actually my favorite time of year, though California has been haunted by the dire risk from wildfires for so long we wisely listen to red flag warnings and air quality indexes, and so the mellow nostalgia of wood smoke is mostly missing. That’s okay. It lives vividly in memories of Thanksgivings spent in my Grandmother’s Napa home, where the wisps of burning oak mingled with the organic tang from great drifts of red and gold maple leaves piled across yards, and swept into gutters when all the world was wet.
Like much of the world, I’ve been changed. I’ve been in hibernation since March. This year I’m life through windows that should be cleaned, past sills that need dusting (and the spider who should be evicted). I won’t be sharing this holiday with my extended family. We’re being careful, but with that care comes a feeling that my life has been mothballed. I try not to look to closely at the baseboards (dust bunnies need homes, too), or the crumbs clinging to my sweater. What is the point? Fortunately, the season has caught up with me. Now the inertia, the desire to stay bundled in bed, to sip hot tea and read novels in thick socks and woolen sweaters makes sense—it’s November, and the world is balanced on the knife’s edge of winter. I can finally stitch the external and internal parts of me into a Frankenstein facsimile of a whole…I will feel almost normal, almost.
But things are changing. The weak light of the season will surely pass like every orbit around the sun that has come before, and slowly I’ve been shaking off the rust. I’ve even banished the worn sofa which had been a life raft drifting on an aimless tide for months. A symbolic purchase calculated to jettison me back into wakefulness. And it is working a little. I sit cross legged on the deep feather stuffed cushions writing, I consider the lint roller sitting next to me on the freshly polished wood floor.
Awakening has come perhaps a half-step too late:the couch is dark gray, and my cats are not.
Good thing I didn’t order the purple one…finding to pets to match would be a bitch.
Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends, and for those of you struggling, or snuggling into your own blankets of isolation—take care. I am with you all in spirit.
LE Franks
