September is a con that suckers me every year. I admire its blue skies and air that is fresh and clear and spiked with smoke; and then suddenly I find myself in late November, blown by Arctic winds down streets turned grey and brown, with fully four more months of winter to be endured. It is now almost, officially, the beginning of fall: heat broken, schools starting, slight tinge of yellow around the edges of the cherry blossom trees in the park, new corps of freshman (always different, always the same) traveling in clusters and clutching books and maps. I know people who relish unpacking their sweaters, who see in fall the promise of a fresh start. Usually, I associate fall with ends, not beginnings. (Or, right now: the start of the end.)
Fall is the season for ripping out the annuals in your garden, for clearing what has shriveled and died in the summer heat, for ruthlessly judging failure or success. It is "mum season," I learned one summer when I worked at the farm in my hometown. Employees spoke wearily of those feared weeks in September when the chrysanthemums arrive by the endless truckload, to be unloaded and unloaded and unloaded and sold to suburban gardeners who plant them for two months of color and rip them out after Thanksgiving (as though they're done, as though they wouldn't come back faithfully in the spring). I've always hated to see perennials planted as annuals. Our city parks ruthlessly remove the tulips as soon as the last tourist has taken the last picture of the last petal fallen from the stems. Walking along certain stretches of the Upper East Side in the spring, you will see planted in windowboxes blue hydrangeas, bred to be dwarfish and deformed, all blossom and no shrub. Like wives, they are replaced when they fade: with chrysanthemums, then with winter pansies, then perhaps with Christmas wreaths and greenery... January sidewalks are full of Christmas trees: sacrificed and cut, anointed and adorned, then discarded to the curb. The city recycles them into woodchips, I know, but the sight of so much waste still bothers me, and not just because of my anxious frugality, my frantic obsession with squeezing every last bit out of the toothpaste tube. We all deserve to live out our seasons fully.
II.
People always say that they want to die in their beds, while asleep, surrounded by family, when they're 90, on a golf course. I want to die in June, my favorite month, the month of very late lilacs and early roses, of strawberries and peonies and, stretching ahead, the promise of a summer that I'll never know. If it sounds like a strange or macabre thing to say, it is, in fact, how I conceive of the passing of time in my life - even now, with no particular garden to measure my life against. (If I organized the last decade of my life, it would go: gardenless, deck on the Los Gatos reservoir, Brooklyn roof garden, Gurgaon roof garden, parents' garden, gardenless, Chelsea roof garden, gardenless. And now I find myself with a new, narrow little sliver of Brooklyn deck, but I am not as sure how to place this garden in time, for how long it might endure.) If I live to be as old as my late grandfather, I will have sixty-two more crisp Septembers, sixty-two more first snowfalls, sixty-one more times to be surprised by the scent of honeysuckle along the road. What I love about lilacs is their ephemerality, I aways say: they flush only for two weeks a year, and so you must breathe deeply in those two weeks; but I tell a half truth. Even as I say, "they don't last," I always assume that there is another year of lavender smudged on green, another year of heady scent, another June to come. We hold fast to this fiction of seasons, to the idea that there is a "spring" of life, asummerfall&winter - as though, when we close in on our Decembers, we will be ready to say anything other than, "Wait, wait, not just yet, I'd like to see another spring."
III.
I've been thinking these days of a friend from an earlier season, whose life sped up quickly before my eyes, suddenly, horribly, like one of those fast-motion nature cameras that shows a butterfly from larva to flight, or the bloom of a rose from bud through decay. The last time I saw her, I knew, without wanting to know or to think any more of it: her fragile, stooped shoulders, like those of an old woman, slumping down into a chest that was sunken, soft, a balloon once full deflating by the day.
We sat on this day last summer in the backyard of her house, a little woodframe house in a development of identical little woodframe houses. Her husband had changed from his suit into jeans and a t-shirt and gotten a beer, as though his goal had been to endure the day until this moment, and we all sat with plates of food on our knees as though it were a normal celebration. In the middle of the yard, by itself, ringed with rocks, stood a spindly dogwood. It didn't seem to have been placed there by design, but of course it was part of a plan. He had bought it for her, he told me, as a birthday or anniversary present, I don't remember now which. It was so delicate, and somehow expectant, I thought, as I toured her house that she bought with her husband, her house in which she made her plans. These were her favorite books on the bookshelf that I remembered from her childhood bedroom, next to her couch in her reading nook upstairs. This was the paint color that she had picked out for her dining room. These plates must have been her wedding gifts. The occasional scratch behind the door was her dog, locked in her bedroom away from the guests. Here was the spare room which she planned one day to turn into a nursery. And this was the tree that she planted where her children might one day run around its base, fall down and cry, giggle and gurgle at the dog; the trunk and height against which she would measure time, when maybe they moved, years later, to a home a little bigger: can you believe how it's grown! That sight has returned to me again and again in these last days of summer: that vulnerable little dogwood, that sign of trust and hope and plans betrayed.
Fall is the season for ripping out the annuals in your garden, for clearing what has shriveled and died in the summer heat, for ruthlessly judging failure or success. It is "mum season," I learned one summer when I worked at the farm in my hometown. Employees spoke wearily of those feared weeks in September when the chrysanthemums arrive by the endless truckload, to be unloaded and unloaded and unloaded and sold to suburban gardeners who plant them for two months of color and rip them out after Thanksgiving (as though they're done, as though they wouldn't come back faithfully in the spring). I've always hated to see perennials planted as annuals. Our city parks ruthlessly remove the tulips as soon as the last tourist has taken the last picture of the last petal fallen from the stems. Walking along certain stretches of the Upper East Side in the spring, you will see planted in windowboxes blue hydrangeas, bred to be dwarfish and deformed, all blossom and no shrub. Like wives, they are replaced when they fade: with chrysanthemums, then with winter pansies, then perhaps with Christmas wreaths and greenery... January sidewalks are full of Christmas trees: sacrificed and cut, anointed and adorned, then discarded to the curb. The city recycles them into woodchips, I know, but the sight of so much waste still bothers me, and not just because of my anxious frugality, my frantic obsession with squeezing every last bit out of the toothpaste tube. We all deserve to live out our seasons fully.
II.
People always say that they want to die in their beds, while asleep, surrounded by family, when they're 90, on a golf course. I want to die in June, my favorite month, the month of very late lilacs and early roses, of strawberries and peonies and, stretching ahead, the promise of a summer that I'll never know. If it sounds like a strange or macabre thing to say, it is, in fact, how I conceive of the passing of time in my life - even now, with no particular garden to measure my life against. (If I organized the last decade of my life, it would go: gardenless, deck on the Los Gatos reservoir, Brooklyn roof garden, Gurgaon roof garden, parents' garden, gardenless, Chelsea roof garden, gardenless. And now I find myself with a new, narrow little sliver of Brooklyn deck, but I am not as sure how to place this garden in time, for how long it might endure.) If I live to be as old as my late grandfather, I will have sixty-two more crisp Septembers, sixty-two more first snowfalls, sixty-one more times to be surprised by the scent of honeysuckle along the road. What I love about lilacs is their ephemerality, I aways say: they flush only for two weeks a year, and so you must breathe deeply in those two weeks; but I tell a half truth. Even as I say, "they don't last," I always assume that there is another year of lavender smudged on green, another year of heady scent, another June to come. We hold fast to this fiction of seasons, to the idea that there is a "spring" of life, asummerfall&winter - as though, when we close in on our Decembers, we will be ready to say anything other than, "Wait, wait, not just yet, I'd like to see another spring."
III.
I've been thinking these days of a friend from an earlier season, whose life sped up quickly before my eyes, suddenly, horribly, like one of those fast-motion nature cameras that shows a butterfly from larva to flight, or the bloom of a rose from bud through decay. The last time I saw her, I knew, without wanting to know or to think any more of it: her fragile, stooped shoulders, like those of an old woman, slumping down into a chest that was sunken, soft, a balloon once full deflating by the day.
We sat on this day last summer in the backyard of her house, a little woodframe house in a development of identical little woodframe houses. Her husband had changed from his suit into jeans and a t-shirt and gotten a beer, as though his goal had been to endure the day until this moment, and we all sat with plates of food on our knees as though it were a normal celebration. In the middle of the yard, by itself, ringed with rocks, stood a spindly dogwood. It didn't seem to have been placed there by design, but of course it was part of a plan. He had bought it for her, he told me, as a birthday or anniversary present, I don't remember now which. It was so delicate, and somehow expectant, I thought, as I toured her house that she bought with her husband, her house in which she made her plans. These were her favorite books on the bookshelf that I remembered from her childhood bedroom, next to her couch in her reading nook upstairs. This was the paint color that she had picked out for her dining room. These plates must have been her wedding gifts. The occasional scratch behind the door was her dog, locked in her bedroom away from the guests. Here was the spare room which she planned one day to turn into a nursery. And this was the tree that she planted where her children might one day run around its base, fall down and cry, giggle and gurgle at the dog; the trunk and height against which she would measure time, when maybe they moved, years later, to a home a little bigger: can you believe how it's grown! That sight has returned to me again and again in these last days of summer: that vulnerable little dogwood, that sign of trust and hope and plans betrayed.
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