I’m a hanger-on. I hang onto things…memories, old receipts, friendships, bad song lyrics. There’s good and bad in hanging on.

       “The stripped and shapely maple grieves

                          the ghosts of her departed leaves”

John Updike’s poem, “November,” in A Child’s Calendar, chimes to me the beginning of the holiday season:  the over-eating of Thanksgiving, the frenzy of Advent, the bone-deep joy of Christmas, and the excitement of Epiphany all begin after this reminder that all gain is loss. All loss is gain.  And we are the better for it.  

This fall has been a lovely one in our lower Arkansas Valley of Colorado. Ours is never the glamour autumn of New England, but this year the river bottom turned flaming yellow, the backyard trees orange and lighter brown, and the leaves crunched under my feet on my slow morning jogs in City Park.  [Read more…]