I spent last weekend in Brookings, South Dakota, presenting at the annual Festival of the Book. The festival was held on the campus of South Dakota State University.
In addition to the festival goers, it was fun to watch the college marching band rehearsing in the parking lot of the arts center, and the many students hustling to classes or hanging out with friends. The breeze had a slight chill and the leaves of the trees were just starting to yellow; autumn was most definitely in the air. I even drank a pumpkin spice latte for the first time, and it was delicious!
On the equinox, the official first day of fall, I was driving home across the state, grasses cured golden on every side, and the sky as wide and blue as the ocean. And now I’m home with a sick kiddo, another harbinger of the season.
As is often the case this time of year, I’m feeling nostalgic. The following is an excerpt from an essay I wrote 7 years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter. It feels like a lifetime, an instant has passed since then, and the paradox of that statement is pretty much what these first chilly days conjure for me….
Walking on the gravel toward the draw, I am surprised by the tops of the cottonwoods nestled in the folds of the land. They are burnished a bright, glowing amber, brighter than any autumn since I’ve moved here. Against the gray sky and dry prairie grasses, they shine like a vein of gold in a granite hillside.
It’s easy to imagine while walking north of our house, what the view would have looked like 100 years ago when my husband’s great-grandparents arrived here and started building their home. It is easy to imagine because it probably looked exactly the same: hills, valleys, a few trees, a lot of grass. It is harder to imagine how they would have felt about the chill that comes creeping through the floorboards this time of year, a chill that comes at night and lasts a little longer each day. Were they scared, waiting for the dark, cold days that lay ahead of them — darker and colder than any I’ve ever known, living as I do in a time of relatively cheap heat and electricity?
Last week was the fall equinox, the exact moment that the shadow cast on the earth is perpendicular to the equator, dividing the globe in half. For an instant, the day and night are equally long. And then, just like that, there is a shift, suddenly the night is longer than the day.
The equinox is a rare moment of balance in a universe that is always tipping one way or another, because, although equilibrium is a state nature is always trying to reach, it is seldom actually achieved.
No one knows this better than the parents of small children. As I walk out into the falling darkness of an early autumn evening, on the day we officially tip toward winter, I am searching for balance too. My body is getting heavier. I have to lean back just to keep from leaning forward.
Meanwhile, though we still call my son “the baby,” we are going to have to stop soon. He keeps changing, faster than we can believe, faster than we thought possible. He is ready to be a big boy, which is a good thing (although it does break his mama’s heart a little bit) because his season for being the baby of our little family is almost at a close. By the time the darkest day of the year arrives, we will have another babe-in-arms, and the bean will officially be the big brother.
Which is why I find myself reflecting on balance. As mother, I am searching for balance as I work to gracefully hold space for the self I was before my son was born, the self I am becoming as he grows and his sister arrives and the self I will become when they are ready to leave their childhoods behind.
