Hidden behind an arbor made of the boughs of an Easter Pine and a Coral-Barked Maple tree, the side yard of our house, behind the wooden fence, is one of the relatively uninhabited and unused sections of our small property. It comes into prominence mostly at this time of the year, when the sun slants prettily through the oak leaves and the maple lights up its corner with a brilliant show of bright chartreuse color, echoing its spring emergence in one of those parallels only nature can conjure without seeming trite.
In this space, the sun can bake the ground a bit when it’s clear during the day, and the scent of pine needles and pine cones rises like a batch of potpourri emblematic of a cozy fall day. I favor this place at this time of the year, and I pause here in my daily ambulations, taking in the afternoon light, the fading warmth of the year.
“We like to filter new information through our own experiences to see if it computes. If it matches up with what we have experiences, it’s valid. If it doesn’t match up, it’s not. But race is not a universal experience. If you are white, there is a good chance you may have been poor at some point in your life, you may have been sick, you may have been discriminated against for being fat or being disabled or being short or being conventionally unattractive, you may have been many things—but you have not been a person of color. So, when a person of color comes to you and says “this is different for me because I’m not white,” when you run the situation through your own lived experience, it often won’t compute. This is usually where the desire to dismiss claims of racial oppression come from—it just doesn’t make sense to you so it cannot be right.
But if you are white, and you are feeling this way, I ask you this: is your lived experience real? Are the situations you’ve lived through real? Are your interpretations of those situations valid?…So if your lived experience and your interpretation of that lived experience are valid, why wouldn’t the lived experience of people of color be just as valid? If I don’t have the right to deem your life, what you see and hear and feel, a lie, why do you have the right to do that to me? Why do you deserve to be believed and people of color don’t?†― Ijeoma Oluo
There’s a small little shaded nook that’s on the path to the Marginal Way.
While technically the space is heavily trafficked, most people rush on by for the more dramatic gardens further down the path, and for the sea itself, crashing against the rocky outcroppings. There is also a little grove of trees that lowers some of its limbs to somewhat obscure the purple asters, the kind seen here in some sunlight.
I needed this memory right now. We also needed Maine this year, but COVID circumstances have kept us home. Seeing these asters the other day brought it all back…
In its somewhat secretive spot, the asters in Ogunquit winked only to those of us who noticed them. You had to slow down a bit, and you had to look a little closer. In the shade, the purple hues were even better at hiding than had they been conspicuously in the spotlight of the sun. Their shyness resonates with me.
For many years, this would traditionally be the time when we’d be preparing for our fall trip to Maine, packing for temperatures that could swing dizzily from eighty-degree beach days to thirty-degree night flurries. The same held true for our Memorial Day weekend visits, so we are accustomed to bringing a little of everything.
In the smiling faces of these asters, I see those happy days again. I recall lazily rolling out of bed and trundling along to Amore Breakfast with Andy, and I can picture the leaves beneath our feet, the receding frost as the sun ascends. I remember our siestas in the knotty pine room, when I’d return from Bread and Roses with some coffee for Andy and a cookie for later.
Nowadays it’s Andy who makes the coffee in our kitchen as fall whips through the fountain grass outside the window, shaking the finches still clinging to the seedbeds of the cup plant. They seem as sad to see summer go by as we are, but it’s warm inside, and our focus shifts cozily to the warm hearth…
Happily, these three favorite people of mine are still dining out and about whenever possible, and in whatever manner and means this new world demands. The featured photo is from a sunny October weekend visit to Amore Breakfast in Ogunquit, something we will look to do again possibly next year, because there is always hope. All four of us keenly felt our extended absence from Ogunquit this year – it’s been too long, and we can’t wait to return when things get back to normal, or at least into a mode of new normality.
The other photos are from a recent birthday dinner at Yono’s, which is probably our favorite Albany restaurant (tied perhaps with dp: An American Brasserie) and I put them up here to remind myself as much as anyone else the importance of family at such times. In the next few weeks, when our country tears itself apart and who knows what may come of it, I find myself retreating and relying on those who mean the most to me – the family and the friends I have made into my family – and that’s how I’m getting through it.
Luckily, I have Andy to help see us through the difficult times, and operating under a safe veil of social isolation and a quarantine-like fortress, we will batten down the hatches and hole up in our home for the fall and winter to come. We will be all right. We have to be.
One of the unheralded joys of the Chinese dogwood tree is its crop of fruit. While not genuinely viewed as edible (the fibrous fruits don’t taste awful as much as their pithy texture makes them undesirable) they are enjoyed by birds and squirrels, which have been going crazy for this year’s crop of bright red berry-like fruit.
For humans, they are more ornamental than functional, and they’re like a second round of blooms before the foliage lights itself on ghostly fire. It’s one of the many charms held by the Chinese dogwood tree, and why we have several in our yard. The finale is about to begin, and by the time it’s done, the buds will have been set for next spring, proof that this lovely tree is always thinking ahead. A tree after my own heart.
It’s been almost a year since I had my last alcoholic beverage, and in that time I must admit to feeling much better both physically and mentally. In addition to that, I’ve been lucky enough not to really miss it all that much – and if I can give up drinking in 2020 then I can pretty much do fucking anything. The only time I felt a slight tinge of wanting alcohol was when the seasons shifted and the idea of a Negroni drifted across my radar. It was probably my all-time favorite cocktail, and I loved it in the spring, and most especially in the fall, when its bitter orange flavor cut through the colder air and warmed the interior of my belly.
I remember several specific moments that happened around a negroni – a fall afternoon before a Madonna concert with Suzie in New York City, an October evening at the Front Porch while waiting for my parents and Andy to join me for dinner, and the flight of Negronis at Cinquecento with Andy on a Boston date night. It holds a special place in my heart, and was the one thing I missed. Especially in late August, when the weather shifts into something cooler, which also happened to be the night of crazy lightning storms right before my birthday this year.
Andy and I were in Boston, trying out the new Terra restaurant at Eataly. We’d only dressed for summer because the day had been so stifling, and by the time the storms descended, we were seated and chilly. The idea of a proper Negroni suddenly seized me, with its bitter bite and bright red coloration. It screamed coziness and warmth and fall in the best possible ways. My cucumber mocktail arrived, and while it was delicious it was slightly too sweet. Designed more for mid-summer than the end of it, and definitely not a cool, stormy night. Andy’s twist on orange soda arrived, and he took a sip and immediately offered some to me, saying it was strange but good.
I waited a bit and then took a sip. Immediately I perked up. This was it! The taste I’d been craving, the slight sting of bitterness that had proven elusive all these months of mocktail-making. It was the closest I’d come to finding a drink that tasted like the tricky Campari element that forms the main thrust of a Negroni. The soda was called Ginger Baladin – produced in Italy and the closest approximation to Campari that I have found. Locating the remaining bottles that Eataly had in stock the next day, we brought them all home, and proceeded to order a bunch more from their website. One can never have enough Negronis for fall.
While it stands alone as an aperitif and Negroni substitute, I added the juice of an orange for a deeper citrus flavor, and a couple drops of bitters for added, well, bitterness. A few days later I tried it again with a blood orange, which worked even better, lending it a deeper red color more reminiscent of the original inspiration. My Negroni fix was fixed, and fall was suddenly a whole lot brighter, and more brilliantly bitter.
This year is not designed for typical birthdays, but Andy has never enjoyed a big fuss over his big day, so we will continue his preferred quiet celebration when it rolls around in a few weeks. As a tease of that, here he is walking through Southwest Corridor Park on my birthday a few weeks ago.
In keeping with the birthday theme, we will be seeing Elaine for lunch today, for an early birthday gathering on a socially-distanced patio at my parents’ home. Andy will make a birthday cake and we will do our best to celebrate in the only way we can during such strange times. I’m taking it all as another opportunity to flaunt my robust outdoor wardrobe and accessories. Finally, all the years of collecting coats and scarves and hats will pay off. And you all laughed and said I was frivolous. Who’s frivolous now?
This is when the chill in the air starts to stick, when the vestiges of summer warmth in the ground finally release their hold. In the subways of the cities, that same warmth is suddenly a comfort you can feel leaving. It is both relief and cause for concern. After a summer when the heat was sometimes overbearing and overwhelming, a little chill was something you could embrace. Part of you knew it was wrong, that you would look back at this moment as when it all began and regret your friendliness with the first snap of cold, and part of you didn’t care because it felt inevitable.
In many ways, October is the anti-thesis of March – it comes in like a lamb and out like a lion. A lion in costume and Halloween splendor. Some of the year’s most beautiful days can be found here, when sunlight sifts through the canary yellow leaves of the trees after a rain, and the sidewalk reflects it all in brilliance you somehow don’t see in summer or spring. It’s a beauty found only in October.
Ropes of goldenrod drape the highways, while explosions of asters perform their shows like echoes of the Fourth of July. The light still carries some warmth, sometimes quite a bit, and the sky is likely the bluest it will be for the remainder of the year. It’s the blueness of the sky I will miss most, at least at first.
Slowly, and then quickly, it all begins to change. The leaves go first, just a few here and there, only in the strongest gusts of wind, and then a storm will come, maybe the remnants of hurricane, and suddenly just a few added drops of water tear them all off at once. Thrilling and obscene, it’s a striptease that’s over too quickly.
October
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care?
Greeting October this year gives me pause, like it usually does, but I’m a bit different than I was last year. Actually, I’m probably a lot different, and so my guard is up in new ways, and down in others. Over the past year, I’ve managed to deconstruct the forty-five-year-old fortress around me, while building an inner stability and sense of self that was somehow always there, but hidden and disguised, even to my bifocal-demanding eyes. And so as October arrives, I feel both naked and fortified. It will not be like last year, or any other year.
Goldenrod gets a bad reputation, blamed for the evils of ragweed when its own pollen is sticky and not airborne. It puts on the fiery show when it is the ragweed that is making everyone sneeze. I’ve always dreaded the arrival of goldenrod’s blooms, the way they signified school starting up again, the way they promised more people and more interactions, more stress and more worry, and more distance from the safety and sweetness of summer.
October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on and on…
Yes, this year will be different, because I’ve shone a light in most of my dim corners, and driven away the shadows, mostly because they were make-believe, composed out of my own fears and perceived injustices. The ones that turned out to be real, the ones I had to confront, were dealt with and dismissed. Some proved stubborn and difficult to eradicate, and I had to work a little harder. Some are in a perpetual state of progress.
The work is challenging, but the work is good, and in spite of all the outward appearances I have carefully orchestrated over the last forty-five years, it turns out that I enjoy working hard toward something. My hands are as happy digging in the dirt of the garden as they are swirling the whipped body cream of the Beekman Boys into each other.
Fall is about hard work. Harvesting and preparing, stocking and baking, hunkering down and fluffing up the winter nest. October is when that process syncs and clicks. September contains more summer than fall – October finally gets to fully flower. Like the goldenrod, nodding along roadsides and forest edges, October is both showy and subdued. By the time the first hard frost arrives, it too will be laid bare.
