It’s coming and this year I’m trying not to let it take my feet out from under me. If you’ve ever been knocked backward by a strong and sudden wave, you know what I mean.
One minute you’re walking along the beach, shiny stones here and there like pocket change spilled, a slightly salty wind — the kind that somehow helps messy hair look on-purpose. You’re perfectly anticipating how high up the beach each wave will slide and side-stepping just in time to avoid ankle-deep cold and soaked shoes. You’re feeling somewhat adept and even sweetly smug. You’ve got this down.
Then, out from under you, come your feet. Wet. Whoosh. Ice-shock- cold. Your butt hits first and you experience that from-very-long-ago familiarity of wet pants. You try to use your arms to get your legs back under you, but the sand sticks like black muck and while you shake that off, the first wave sucks back out. You’re relieved and continue to attempt a vertical position as a new wave ushers in, and grabs you in its cold foam.
Summer is ended. Fall is back. Even when we are grown and no longer tied to back-to-school or any harvest — either of the mind or the land — come September, a countdown cranks up.
Fall, autumn, the slope downward toward winter, whatever you call it, it’s here; even if we’re being inattentive, we feel it reaching fingers around the corners of our hours. Even if we’re trying to ignore it, we sense something lapping higher up the beach and more deeply into our days.
In my life, time begins to feel like it is dead-set on moving faster — crazy fast, bad-fast, you-can’t-catch-me fast. In response, I’ve begun to drag my feet; even in my sleep I worry I can’t catch up.
We’re entering into a time when the rhythms of the sun and moon start to change — the light grows weaker as the Earth, like a thin woman, almost imperceptibly pulls her sweater gently around her shoulders. Later, she will hunch fully, back turned into the frigid wind, blanketed and still to preserve her strength, but for now — early fall — her motions are subtle, definitive, graceful.
But, many of us don’t feel subtle, definitive or graceful about now. No, instead we feel anxious (flu, health care, war, money, loss), irritable (fringe Democrats and fringe Republicans fighting, real leaders fighting, countries squealing dangerously hell-bent on threat and posturing) and rushed (Halloween coming — the stores have told me so since August, banks are still flailing, money seems to be draining through fingers and the grocery bags grow lighter, flu shot — one or two? Umbrella?)
We feel pushed and rushed to get it done, get it in on time, get it organized. Look around you, there’s an artificiality to our lives that must be combated — we don’t have to be as fast and efficient as the buttons we push on our phones: we think we should do too much in a day.
Combat it. Our lives shouldn’t feel like things-we-didn’t-accomplish news crawls running along the bottom of our days. Allow yourself not to process simultaneously information all day, every day, at the expense of your own stillness. Look around you; even though it feels like weeks are passing in great bundles, parcels, globs, whizzing by and gone, they aren’t.
Time is moving just like it always has. Last week I turned onto County Road 38E, like I do every day, and a huff of disappointment dropped from my mouth: The pumpkins at the corner house were already round-orange, peeking through the weeds. I missed the whole growing.
I drove past the patch every day as the vines grew bigger and twined, as the flowers opened, bloomed orange and large, as the fruit took shape and then color. I didn’t note a bit of it, not a single step. No wonder time seems to pass in great chunks — I forget to note it passing slowly.
Today, breathe. Let the rush out — do it subtlety, gracefully, definitively. Then, look around you. Winter will come as it should, but first, glorious fall.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
