The Days of September

I have to face the fact that summer is over and September is well on its way. I recognize all the signs: plummeting temperatures that almost reach the freezing point at night; geese honking across the evening sky and staging on the nearby lake; sunset arriving earlier as I go on my evening walk; our neighbor's apple tree loaded with sun-ripened fruit that falls to the ground and rots (When is he going to pick them? When is he going to bring us some? Maybe he forgot this year!); me, dragging my houseplants inside from the deck and realizing that they have grown immensely over the summer and I don't have room for them all. Our bright kitchen is beginning to look overgrown and I'm debating about which plants I have to get rid of.

There is beauty in this season of slow relinquishment, even though it is tinged with sadness. The poetry of Keats (To Autumn) and Rilke (Die Blätter fallen) hum in my head:

The leaves are falling, falling from afar, / as if in heaven distant gardens wither /

they fall reluctantly / and in the night the heavy earth has fallen / 

from all the stars into its loneliness. /

We all are falling. / This hand falls. / Regard the other one. / It lies in all. /

And yet there is one / holding all this falling / forever gently in his hands. 

                                                                          (R.M. Rilke, Die Blätter, trsl. by E.N. Schroeder)                                                   

Autumn Leaves, by Sir John Everett Millais

My summer reading has, for some reason, been all about the sadness experienced by people through abandonment and death, and how they (for the most part) manage to struggle through to the other side.

It began with Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search by Martin Sexsmith, which we chose to read for our Sisters' Book Club. The Catholic Church took three-year-old Michael away from his single mother and sold him to a well-meaning American family. For years mother and son searched for each other from across the Atlantic. The book itself is very sad and rather depressing, with little redemption. I saw the movie (Philomena) first and (exceptionally) it was much better than the book.

Another book on the topic of adoption is Maurice Mierau's Detachment: An Adoption Memoir. It  is written from the parents' perspective. The author and his wife adopted two brothers, a three-year-old and a five-year-old from a Ukrainian orphanage in 2005. Like Michael in Philomena, the boys struggle with a sense of abandonment. Mierau deftly weaves the adoption experience in with his father's traumatic past; that of a small Mennonite boy who witnessed atrocities in war-torn Ukraine and Germany during World War II. The memoir is realistic and unsentimental. Both of these books widened my horizon and helped me toward a better understanding of what happens to children psychologically when they feel that their parents have forsaken them.

Moving from these adoption books, I read two books by Beth Powning which deal with the grieving process after losing a loved one. The Shadow Child (1999) is the story of a mother coming to terms with the stillbirth of her first child. I resonated with this memoir because it so accurately described my own feelings after losing our premature son.

Powning's second book, The Hatbox Letters, is a novel of love, grief and renewal. A widow begins to connect the strands of her unravelled life, while at the same time piecing together the hidden tragedy of her family through the reading of old letters. I was never bored by Powning's lengthy descriptive passages. They are like paintings in a museum that you can look at time and again and discover new meaning.

                     

I know that winter is inevitable and I will deal with it. I'll just move my chair a little closer to the fireplace, pick up a good book and transport myself into another world for a while. But for now, there is still time to enjoy autumn's splendor. I hope these Indian summer days will stretch well into November.