Centering

I blinked and September was gone.

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The tree right outside my window is always the first on my street to turn yellow. It might be a honey locust. I’m not sure and I’m not great at identifying trees, but I call her an impatient drama queen because when she fills my view with her yellowing leaves, it already looks like full-blown Fall in September.

It’s only when I walk outside do I realize what a trickster she is when every other tree on the block is still green.

Not the view outside my window, but the same tree. Do you know what it is?

I’ve been waiting with dread all summer for the scaffolding that was supposed to go up in front of our building. New Yorkers will understand. Everywhere around the city, you’ll encounter blocks with scaffolds laddering up the side of buildings and you’ll inevitably walk under a few. Accompanying the metal pipes and plywood is dark netting that enshrouds the facade. It’s there to catch debris from brickwork repairs, but it dims the light that comes through the windows considerably.

But I learned that our end of the building will be spared. I get to keep my view of this tree that likes to hurry the seasons along with her impatience. The tree that will later trick me into thinking that winter is here because when I look out, her branches will be bare when all the other trees in the neighborhood are still showing off their brilliant colors.

It’s the small things.

Because I blinked and September was gone. But what noise it made while it was still here.

I never know how to dress when I walk out the door in September, but I’m finally putting away the sandals

I’ve decided that September is the shortest month of all—a trickster, an illusion of seasons—like this tree. It also feels like a month when centering becomes important because September is the month of transitions. The month where we reset from summer’s abandon of schedules. When we harvest what’s left and pull annuals from their pots while making our best guess at which perennials might survive. We make these decisions on what to save and what to let go.

We got a lot of sungolds out of our tomato plants this season. Mark’s still blogging about gardening on our balcony.

Moving on to figs and I would love to have a fig tree

There are benefits to living with a pastry chef

September was also busy and the distraction was partially by design. It felt like a throwback to the days when I was juggling a lot of work and parenting, except this month I parented through a phone screen. I was maybe silly to think that I would free up more mental space when the kids left home, but I entered into a new era of long distance parenting instead. We still need our moms.

And I feel fortunate to be able to say this at all.

I will tell you that at this moment, I feel sad from a confluence of terrible news all at once over the course of a week—some close to home and some broadcast through the screen from news on my computer. Even in typing this, it feels oddly inappropriate for me to feel sad because this is not my tragedy, not my grief, my recovery. Not my war.

I’ll get to enjoy seeing my children come home from college for their fall breaks this month while others I know won’t come home ever at all. I get to sit here enjoying my view out the window while others are only just beginning to pick up the literal pieces of their lives.

Life feels arbitrary at times.
Why this family, why not mine?
Why the storm there and not here?

And then I remind myself that few are spared from sadness and suffering. It’s just not my turn right now, but it will come around again. It always does.

I will say this: life isn’t fair. Society isn’t designed to be fair. And life is more unfair to some than others. There is so much suffering in the world and I sit here feeling like a jerk because I don’t want to be that privileged nobody who writes about how sad she is.

So I scrub and clean for hours because this is what I realize I do to process things I can’t understand. Scrub pots, scrub walls, empty the contents of drawers, take them apart and put them back together.

I’m just coping and trying to practice gratitude. At the end of the day, aren’t most of us doing just that?

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This week’s drawing

I don’t know if I ever shared this. I’m sharing it now.

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Related reading

The year of possibilities

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Links of interest

• Ways to donate and help flood victims in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene (BPR News – hat tip

  Youngna Park
  )
  I know many of us feel helpless right now and donating may not feel like enough, but here’s a list of organizations.
  

• The Quinceañera’s Midlife Remix Many Latina women hitting 50 aren’t just throwing a big party—they’re determined to redefine what it means to age. (The Atlantic – may be be paywalled)
  “The cincuentañera, then, is a chance for women to celebrate a second coming-of-age, this time as the grown adults that they could only dream of being when they were 15.”
  I like the idea of this. I’m not one for big parties, but turning 50 right when everything shut down as the pandemic got deadly was so deflating.
  

• Is Culture Dying? The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that “deculturation” is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences. (The New Yorker)
  

• A new loneliness cure: Apps that match you with strangers for a meal (Washington Post – may be paywalled)
  Like dating, but for friends. I’ve never used dating apps before because that is way ahead of my time when I was in that stage of life, but I’m sitting here wondering if I would use an app to make new friends?
  

• The Problem Isn’t Technology, It’s Us Iona Italia talks to Timandra Harkness about her new book, on our ambivalent relationship with personalised technology.
  (Quillette)