For some reason I have been able to pay more attention to fall this year. Usually, Halloween comes in hot feeling like Labor Day was just last weekend. I pivot to the demand of the academic calendar and its extracurricular everything making the days slip through my fingers. Then, BAM, it’s Thanksgiving.
Maybe it is because I dropped my son off at college at the end of August offering a new sense of indefinite to which I have yet to become accustomed. September and October robbing me of his company, the tortuous wait for Thanksgiving and Winter Break.
Maybe it is how the leaves turned, or didn’t. Summer green seemed to last longer than usual only to become a muted yellowy beige. A slow letting down this year. A continuous confetti shower of the driest of pine needles and leaves.
Maybe it’s the warm air, the little rain, the bright sunshine. We’ve been slow to turn inside and cozy up.
Maybe it’s the anticipation of the election, of change, of sated curiosity. And what will we do now?
And still, it’s only Halloween. (BOO! by the way)
I have been longing for this slowed pace. Exploring presence and present. Gaining some control back from the incoherent demands of my monkey brain that, all this long time, has sought to prove it is smarter than I am (which it is not). Finding little gems. Little sparkly surprises that get missed when I am moving at the speed of light.
Last Friday. A walk with a builder friend. The conversational path we tread, twenty-five years in the making, as solid as the packed dirt under our feet. Dusty, fraying, worn. Stable, accepting, known. The ebb of topics burgeoning the familiar: fear, fatigue, competition, release, hilarity, promise, pain, celebration—the gamut that has run through my body year after year after year.
We walked to the end of the trail and turned back. Sat for a bit on a flat-topped boulder. We talked about his cancer. How it is better now. The confetti of falling leaves and pine needles there too, as quiet as a January snow.
He told me a love story. Two friends whom he hadn’t, actually, previously felt very connected to. Bookending him on a small sofa on one of his weaker days after a month of treatment. He couldn’t be anymore than he was. Nor could they. So, there they sat, letting the moment be care enough.
This hit that deeper chord in me. The one strummed only on occasion, resolutely reserved for life purpose kind of stuff. I was so struck by such extraordinary abandonment of presuppositions. It was all there, present. He knew he didn’t have synergy with the couple and they probably knew that too, making it even more deliciously rich. The surrender. “I felt so loved” he said. “And now I love them.”
Love. Remember that emotion? I work pretty hard to test it, resist it, dismiss it, protect it, reserve it. Anything but surrender to it. Yet there it is. Sitting on the sofa.
A similar sense of love I felt with another thing that happened this fall. I went to Phoenix with three women from FH Perry Builder to the Women in Residential and Commercial Construction Conference. Early September. It feels like forever ago. That too was love. Unequivocal passion for the work and the women who do this work.
I tried to match it all in a speech I made there. Trying not to be any more than I am to a room full of women being everything they are. Trying out the suggestion that being yourself, as you know it in your heart, is all it takes. And so we tried it. Bookending each other for three days. Because love is what this industry does.
“I love you” he said as we parted ways in the parking lot after we walked. And I knew he meant it. And I felt it.
“I love you too.”
Allison
