Some Seasons Seem To Never End

 I know it's been nearly two years. I know.
But today my mind wants to wander to the strength of the trees and the shortness of time.
It is the crispness in the air. The smell of fading honeysuckles.  Pumpkins and soup. Straw on a porch.  The turning of this life clock into fall transforms my heart into a timepiece of random recollection. In pieces. Short movies that run and replay when the weather gets foggy and the rain beats on my window.


I watched him go in a million ways that fall. My Dad. First his fighting. Then angry acceptance. More fighting...with me, and with covers, and with nurses, with his God and with himself.
Finally surrender.

The way he called me "sis" in those midnight hours on the third floor. Is it possible that I still smell the room? The hallway? The sterile?  The starkness of all that was still and waiting in that place where they wheeled people in, but no one got out. I wondered many times where his mind must be. And what he thought of lying in the bed of inevitable death. One night we watched a Braves game. I won't soon forget the look of contentment on his face. How proud he was to sit up and follow the bases one more time.  I found it full of grief.

 (The apples are lovely this time of year, don't you think?)

I wanted him to watch many more games in the field of his youth.

I didn't want to watch him watch his last one.

Oh why, oh why, am I drawn to apple trees in summer?

It is Fall.

 There is a memory I hold way back in the dark part of me. And still I can't write it. Maybe...oh maybe I never will.  It was during one of those times when the morphine raged and all the venom and pain came out in his words. Some locked away for years I'd never heard that seemed to escape and lay claim to his indignities.
And mine.

My mind is full of them.  Those words. That tree is full of them.

 But his chair....his chair is empty don't you see. I don't hear his voice in the dark anymore.

It went flying round the bases round the moon round the moon....

Some seasons seem to never end.

All I want to do is look at apples in fall where summer should be. 

Gatherings and preachers, baskets of carnations and.....

apples

Perhaps I am beginning to find comfort in the places he lived and not in the ways he died. Somehow the emptiness of the chair, the wideness of the meadow and the fullness of that tree

brings forth a word. 

A word I can't find. On the tip of my tongue. It's sitting there in my brain. Under the covers. And it is fighting with me. Perched on the portals of anger looking out from the room where words are held in confinement, knowing full well the surrender must come. And like my daddy's outbursts of chemical verbiage, it wants to scream all over this page. But not tonight. 
Daddy's apple tree has more fruit.
And I must be patient.
A good patient.









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