October. . .

There is a fullness happening.  Is it just my new vitamins taking hold?  Or is it the October light - the way it envelops you in its arms and dances you around the room? May I have this dance? 

Is it both?  Is it more? Is it something else entirely?

We have prevailed against the relentless heat, through no skill of our own. The slow tipping of the globe stepped in, refereed.  Just in the nick of time, those bullying temperatures were sent packing, and are now searing off a more Southern part of the world.

The windows are open during the day now; we can breathe the sweet air.  Outside can now breathe us, in and out. The light breathes us, in and out. 

Maybe that is what I was feeling yesterday, as I dug my trowel through the dark soil, adding compost to the cold frames, preparing to sprinkle in the tiny seeds of autumn:  kale and chicory, deer-tongue lettuce, mache and claytonia, arugula and spinach.  Lifting my head from its fragrance - there is no perfume like that of healthy ground - the light greeted me, delighted. As did secret potatoes, those that evaded my searching hands when I harvested from these same boxes in late Spring.  

Survivor tomatoes, their flavor concentrated by an over- abundance of sun and lack of rain, their skins toughened, their color a deeper, richer red, these came back to the kitchen too, along with a couple of rogue red peppers, undiscovered and past their prime, their skins wrinkled as an old woman’s.  They too will have an special intensity.  I thanked them all for hanging on, for waiting for me.  

It all waits for me, generous as a lover: the light, the birdsong, the soil. . .it all waits for me to lift my head ever so slightly, to just notice, may I have this dance?