Indian Summer Sunday, October 29, 2023



Technically Indian summer doesn't come until after the first freeze.

But we had a deep chill and then near 90 over the last few days. So, this may well have been Indian summer as a new string of showers brings us into the cold. -- not yet snow like that Halloween in 2011 when still leaf laden trees in our back yard cracked and fell leaving a brutal landscape I could not clear till the following spring -- eye surgery leaving me half blind and prohibited from any heavy labor.

it was a vulnerable time, too, partly because I had to travel to surgery alone in the back of a bumpy cab which got lost on the way to the hospital.

I held the resentment against my wife as deeply into spring as the broken tree limbs.

The death of Uncle Pete in early 2012 added to this sense of my mortality and perhaps made me vulnerable to what later happened.

I was 59 going into 60, an age I always thought of as old and suddenly someone admired me, and I went ahead over heels.

Now, after other surgeries associated with old age some of those feelings still linger in me --. the good and bad times, the intensely positive and equally negative things I did or said or thought.

Time has caught up with me, each new decade bringing me closer to that shore for a sailing from which there is no return. I feel my mortality even more actually now as I did then and the chill after Indian summer only makes my bones hurt more, envisioning the black sails of that ship destined to take me away.

                           Day to Day menu


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