Fall is truly here. The crisp joy of cooler weather and warmer, cozier clothes but along with that is the melancholy of approaching winter. I want to curl up with a good book, a cup of tea and a cat and snooze the day away. I also want to cook delicious hearty soups, apple pies and meatloaf. Every year this feeling catches and grips on and I ache wanting something different but not knowing what that is. This year, the heaviness has taken on an additional exhausted quality.
The missus and I spent last weekend with my family at a cousin’s wedding in Maine. We drank, danced, ate well and shared stories. We had a wonderful time and hopped in the car to drive home full of fantastic stories and ready for a relaxing week, a couple good nights sleep and such. In the car on the way home we got the news that the missus’ grandfather had passed away. He’d been sick since July – checked into a nursing home and switching between there and a hospital depending on his health each week.
That the call was not unexpected did not lessen the impact, and we drove in silence for a while, feeling the weight of change in the world. And then we started making plans for this past weekend, figuring out how many days of bereavement leave we both had, figuring out when we were needed in her home town to help out, determining whether her mother was in town for us to stay there (and searching for hotels just in case)… and then we picked up a car on Friday and drove south, heavy thoughts in our heads, the exhaustion from the joyful weekend still weighing us down. We spent two days at the funeral and helping clean through some of her grandfather’s things and drove back up yesterday, feeling more spent and exhausted than before and again hoping for a relaxing week, a few nights of good sleep and the chance to catch our breath again.
Life is so fleeting, so precious, so easily described with cliches. This week, I’m going to do my best to be present in each moment. I’m also going to, with the missus, sort through some of our papers and books because having sorted through four shoeboxes of old receipts from lumber stores ($2.16, $4.23) for unintelligible items I realize how little of our paperwork would really mean anything even to us in four years.
This week’s motto then: Be present, and keep only what is necessary…and remember the missus’ grandpa.