Hello, Goodbye, Hello

People enjoy feeling wistful—at least that’s what I’ve come to think. Especially in the autumn. Yes it’s beautiful, but rhapsodizing about “the red maples, the yellow birches, all against the evergreen backdrop!” feels to me to be more about grasping the last of summer than a way to welcome a new season.

messing about in a rowboat

Admittedly, autumn as a season on the calendar stretches far longer than the leaves stay on the trees, and it is difficult to find beauty of the traditional “eye catching flame in the trees” sort come late October early November.

In my ongoing series of thoughts about obituaries and saying goodbye and wrapping up a person‘s life, I’m also thinking just in general about endings and beginnings and changing.

Possibly it’s a way to deal with things (waves hands at “the world today"), but possibly it’s because I’m approaching a birthday ending in five. This birthday requires me to sign up for things—or not. To make choices that will affect my long-term future. It’s kind of a scary time to be trying to discern what that long-term future might look like (she said understatedly).

My husband and I are writers, and between the two of us, we put out books in 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024, and now 2025. Two are mine, four are his (that I've edited and produced and released and even publicized, as much as I do that). His most recent book is a compilation of his poetry, prose, and plays--a short anthology about 200 pages that was, for me, a creative challenge and a real joy to work on.

And now it’s time to let go of that book.

Yes, I have (SO MANY) other projects to work on, but there’s always a moment of transition: you box up some of the old files, you check your checklist to make sure that everything for the book has been done that you can do, and you put the file into a filing cabinet. Or in my case, a different stack somewhere else, preferably not on the table where I happen to be working that day.

This time of year is also a change in season. It's also time to wrap up summer and prep for winter. So questions arise. 

Is it time to get rid of those shorts that I haven’t worn in two years even though I think I might when I work through the full shorts rotation in some future warmer summer? What about the stained sweatshirt that I have loved for years, but that isn’t actually even comfortable anymore? Do we need 14 jillion sets of loppers, some of which never worked well and others of which are "fixed" with duct tape?

But hey, look at that! As I’m standing in front of the closet wondering about these shorts, I see the sweaters I bought on sale at the end of last season. It’s too warm still for some of them, but many of them are appropriate for the in-between, and that’s a gift from my past self to my current and future self.

Which brings me back to signing up for things and taking care of logistical details like, you know, estates, lawyers, tax returns, etc. From all of these things that I don't want to do, what gifts can I give my future self? How can I look ahead at a time that it feels like everything is wrapping up? Or at least changing, possibly significantly?

The leaves on the birch have gone from sorta-green to mostly gold to increasingly sparse. I'm still in process. I've paid some bills (literal and metaphorical). I'm accepting some unknowns as known unknowns and allowing other unknowns to be mysterious.

I don’t have answers, just questions. And I like that. Sometimes, holding a question and looking at it for a while is what I need to do. Maybe I like being wistful, too.