September

You notice the cooling of the air, just a brush against your cheek and you turn, as though someone had called your name but there is nothing–only a slight shaking of the trees, as though they know something you do not. They always do. You begin to have a sense of missing something, someone. There is a slow tide pulling out. There is a conspiracy happening, ancient, sure of itself, and inevitable. It doesn’t ask your permission. It doesn’t care that you remember the night you fell in love, thinking it was still summer, wearing a short black cocktail dress–a dress you never wore again–believing everything was touched in the last long lapis blue of an August night. Only, it hadn’t been August and the blue was a reflection of neon and a city heaving its last hot sigh of summer.

 

It’s an in-between place. Everyone rushes to the park, to the air mattress, the pool, the lounger, for one last long bronzing afternoon of feeling carefree marked by sandwiches in a small cooler and warm soda.

 

The gold of early September isn’t tinny or plastic–it’s a burnished, warm, oozing gold that saturates the horizon. It’s giving you its best. It knows there’s just a few more days and it will be gone again. It rolls along the coastline, painting beach bodies, lifeguard chairs, cardboard fish and chip containers that tumble out of city garbage cans, and crows perch, pecking at leftover fries while the sand soaks it all in, humming its last summer song before it goes to gray.

 

Everyone longs for the summer nights to go on, even knowing they won’t–with absolute certainty they know they won’t–still they long for it, lean towards it, gathering together to twist out of the rays every molecule of warmth, as charcoal smoke blots out the dying sun, and small dusty feet run towards grandparents who have seen in the distance a leaf float and drop and feel relieved. They alone wish for the coming cold.

 

Summer and fall meet at the beginning of September and for a short time, have a kind of exchange–silent, done at night, finished by morning. My son was born after one of these nights and we woke to a deep cloud, the forest shrouded in fog and the first cold rain. His birthday is always a day I never want to end. He, deeply tanned now with a single lock of blonde dappling his forehead, shoulders strong from early morning weight sessions and ocean swimming, with a new tattoo that holds secrets I will never know, doesn’t care as much. He shrugs, accepts it is time to wear pants again. Me, knowing it is time to let go, stand in the sunset and listen to the shore sounds, now quiet as fall brings in faint whitecaps and wind, and I realize the way forward is always like this–a receding tide, a falling leaf, a new season.

 

All pictures and words © Margaret Doyle 2014

 

When Life Comes For You

Sometimes life comes for you. You are minding your own business. You are checking off boxes. Done. Done. Done. You have some semblance of balance going on. The large goal on the horizon is there, as it ever was, each day and you work towards it slowly, bit by bit. Life is neither good nor bad. There’s very little hyperbole. You do what you have to do.

Then one day life comes for you and says, in a slightly foreign accent, because all big changes have a certain character to them: “You aren’t going there. You’re going here.”

Oh.

And suddenly you get it. All those nights you dreamt of what it would feel like to have your heart’s desire. What it would look like. Taste like. It’s come to you. Not as you planned. Not as you expected. Not in the shape or form or sound you thought it would. And then you see the genius of life–the unfolding of an origami design that you could never have imagined–this is the thing some people call fate. I don’t know that I have a word for it other then to call it life.

So. Life has come for me. And I’ve said yes.

In Full Bloom

A friend recently asked me, ‘What should I do?’ about a particular relationship challenge and I said, just step into it fully and speak your truth. It sounded like an Oprah quote. Maybe it is. Maybe women’s magazines have truly sunk into my lexicon. But nevertheless, it’s still good advice.

I haven’t taken it myself though.

I’ve been guilty of withholding. Of avoidance. Of obfuscation. Denial. Plain lying.

We all do it.

Stepping into your truth takes cojones.

Like stepping over a cliff but instead of falling, you break open and discover things about yourself that are sometimes the most painful to know but that’s because it’s where the truth was hiding.

As a writer, it’s impossible not to look underneath the surface, turn every stone over, kick every tire. Eventually we circle around our own story until our hearts and memories become the garden we weed, prune, re-plant, and nurture. We were meant to be there all along but sometimes we lose our way.

I guess that is one of life’s purposes: To discover the way back to our true self so we can be found in full bloom.