The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      October 2000
      October 1, 2000
      Sunday

      Look, the trees
      are turning
      their own bodies
      into pillars

      of light,
      are giving off the rich
      fragrance of cinnamon
      and fulfillment, ...
                  -- Mary Oliver
                      "In Blackwater Woods"

      The bush at the corner of the garage has a single leaf turned a deep scarlet. Among the giants at the far end of the meadow, one tree gone a burnished rust stands between two still in their deep summer hunter green. In front of them is one which has never given up its first spring gold, the hue that Robert Frost said couldn't stay. Beyond the windows of my study, some of the outer branches on the pin oaks have begun to take on the brown of a Bosc pear. Others are fading to yellow.

      There are afternoons during the spring and summer when I sit at my writing place in the kitchen, pen in hand and paper ready, and spend the whole writing session looking at the light. The colors of autumn have a different effect. They call me to walk among them, to breathe in that rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment.

      It's predicted that the colors will be unusually bright and rich this year because the summer was not so dry and hot. I've heard that the colors we see in the fall represent the leaves' true nature. Summer's moisture and sunlight cause the production of green chlorophyll to flood the leaf. As the light begins to fade, production levels drop and the green recedes. Only then can the true color of the leaf be revealed.

      For several years in the early seventies I lived in an apartment carved out of an old country house that had a spectacular forest view. During a time of deep personal confusion, I made sudden and ill-considered decisions that forced me to move from there one sodden spring. For a while I lived in a cramped conventional apartment complex where the view was of a parking lot and office construction site.

      I came to understand that I had spent too many autumns in the beaituful place ignoring it while I went about the business of getting and spending. I did not know until it was gone that there was something in the colors and the light that nurtured and sustained me even if I paid little attention to it, and I grieved that I had not loved it better.

      I have always felt most alive and connected in autumn. Living on school time for so long, it was always my season of fresh starts, of turning new leaves, of trying new approaches to old problems. As I move deeper into midlife I understand better and better what Mary Oliver means in the poem I read daily during October:

      Every year
      everything
      I have ever learned

      in my lifetime
      leads back to this: the fires
      and the black river of loss
      whose other side

      is salvation,
      whose meaning
      none of us will ever know.
      To live in this world

      you must be able
      to do three things:
      to love what is mortal;
      to hold it

      against your bones knowing
      your own life depends on it;
      and when the time comes to let it go,
      to let it go.

      I wear this awareness like a shawl, and move into one more autumn warmed by it rather than smothered. I'm in a good season in my life. My own true colors get brighter every day. And though I know that loss awaits, I know also that what I have must be savored and treasured while it is here.


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      Margaret DeAngelis.

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