...and Autumn coming in.

Summer lingered a long time this year. The hurricanes that decimated the Gulf coast found their end in New England as wave after wave of warm rainstorms. The unseasonable warmth prevented the trees from turning, so visually it was difficult to tell it wasn't late spring or early summer.

Emotionally, however, there was a palpable sensation quite at odds with the damp greenery around us, a sense of completion, of things coming to resolution, which made it quite obvious that summer had silently made way for autumn. This sensation was somehow reinforced by the woeful tales that starting making the rounds, both the imported tales of Hurricane survivors, and from closer to home as well. Our next door neighbor's best friend had a terrible injury days before his wedding. Another friend reported the handyman who kept up their property was killed in an auto accident. The brother of someone at work passed away suddenly. The old saying "bad luck comes in threes" was appended to "...or fours," and then to "...or fives."

My mother, getting on in years, had been slowing down for a while -- less comfortable visiting us for dinner, less able to follow conversations and remember details. Through the spring and summer the occasional lapses turned into habits, and then became expectations. She took a tumble getting out of bed, and did a stint in the hospital for observation. Another tumble, another few days in the hospital, this time followed by a round of Physical Therapy and some new medications. Suddenly, she lost interest in eating, and it was off to the hospital again. A few days of intensive coddling by the nursing aides and some fine tuning of her Meds, and she was better again.

But, at age 93 it's hard to hold back the inevitable, and with each round of hospitalization it became more obvious that "better" was quite relative, and at this point "actually eating something at all" was about as good as it was going to get. Our visits would more frequently find her asleep, and conversations went from pages to paragraphs to sentences, and finally to a few words or a nod of the head. Then came the call at one in the morning, and the drive in the dark to hold her hand, and to talk without expecting an answer, and to wait.

The first frost came as a snowstorm that dusted an inch of white over the grass, and put the green trees into stark contrast. Grudgingly the leaves finally began to turn, but not to the brilliant scarlets and golds of a normal season but instead to shades of maroon and amber. Neither flashy nor particularly sad, but dignified, inevitable, and somehow fitting.

As for the snow, it was gone by noon the next day as the temperature rose again, and life went on with its memory.