September Soliloquy

Steaming cuppa in my hand on a cool September morning. Two little trees, heavy with apples, brambles bending with blackberries and soft, sweet figs on the bough...fruit of the summer's finale is ready for the picking. The gold flowers on the fennel catch the sun and hand it over to the purple asters beside them, spilling some across the hillside of Queen Anne's Lace and dandelions. The hollyhock flowers are fading but the seed pods sit like fat and happy turbans on sultans along the stems. The star jasmine and gardenia still perfume the air and the rose of sharon blooms all along the fence.The dew on lawns across the bay sparkle like lime sorbet in the sun's rays, the teal tide between our side and their's.

The last rains of August have washed and sweetened the air for September...can it really be September already? I guess so 'cos someone has begun to paint the odd sumac leaf red and the odd maple, yellow. Bucks have begun to rub their antlers against the trees and the spotted eagles have learned to fish for themselves; orange school buses join the moving snake of traffic northbound.

October will mark a decade (three thousand, six hundred and fifty days) since my daughter was bitten by a tick that carried Lyme, so many of those days with neither hope nor help. Now we celebrate two years of treatment, something I didn't think possible just three years ago. Just around the corner are surprises you never dreamed possible...but you ask anyway. We're gonna lick this tick thing, and we're gonna make sure people learn, so that we stem the plague. You don't go looking for a cause; a cause slaps you upside the head. Somedays I can hold up a torch, somedays I can barely strike the flint...but the fire always wants to be.

We will celebrate our nineteenth wedding anniversary this month...a working partnership and loving friendship I'm so grateful for. Everyone should have this right to marry, have rights to the promise of weathering love's change in seasons, around the core of friendship. Nothing is perfect but our imperfect striving, our reaching for one another and balance. Who are we to deny others' reach? In November I will celebrate fifty-three years of my own marrying, loving, weathering and changing landscape.

September and, for a moment, we'll balance on straight axis...only to fall past and continue moving, being moved...falling on our asses or faces and getting back up on our own reinventions, to see what's around that corner. In September my beloveds all whisper that they're still here, on the breezes that can only bring change. Silver clouds, slipping into place, would have us believe the sun has abandoned us; how personally we take what just is and seek to make it orbit around our never-satisfied desires.

I love the blue sapphire of September so I slip-on my maternal grandmother's "keeper" ring. It's a small blue sapphire with two diamonds, set in a gold band. It has two carved hearts, and six-pointed stars surround the stones. It's well over a hundred years old. It sat on my ring-finger through my first marriage to my childrens' father and now, in a symbolic way, it only fits on my pinkie but stays with me. If we like "here" how can we regret the roadmap we followed? September's sapphire; in the blue are the stars to steer by.