Autumn

Back in Tennessee for the past week, so hard to believe I have five grandchildren, Marte is sick, Catlin's wife so I have had Grandmother duties for the past week. Diapers, bottles, laundry, the smells of a baby should be bottled and sold for stress. Memories of my own four and the work, the endless work. I still hear babies cry in my sleep.

Autumn in Tennessee is like no other place. There are the mock orange trees that drop the round green balls that look like alien brains all over the ground, all along the roadways they lay and when run over by a car wheel they explode with a pungent odor that clings to the car for days, yet I love it, only in Tennessee. The pumpkins that dot all the produce stands along the way and corn stalks and fields full of horses running rampant with their tails high and heads higher, they can feel the change in the air and know autumn has come and the promise of cool nights cuddled into a featherbed and the sleep that comes and lingers throughout the day, there is nothing so fine as autumn in Tennessee.

I miss my friends here, they all seem scattered. I miss Rosemary and grieve I no longer have her in my life, her son committed suicide two years ago and I suppose with his death she threw out friends also, was the past too painful for her? I suppose I will never know. I miss Vicki and her wisdom and her kindness that carressed us all and gave us a core to belong. I miss Margaret Conners and Kathy S. Emerson. Cecil, so many of my friends are gone and I can't find them.

I miss my dearest Cindy M and the lifelink of J that can not be broken, blood is thicker than water but water carries the grimness of tears that go on and on, still 26 years later.

God is good to me, and He loves me and has taken such good care of me, and in the midst of trying to figure out what happened and why the noonday demon, the black dog of depression still haunts, I have found that the only cure is taking care of myself first. That has been the hardest thing to do.

I wish I had my Jim here with me to see this Tennessee autumn and feel the blueness of the sky and the full moon kiss us goodnight with the promise of what tomorrow brings.
Do random acts of kindness.