Google+ A Tangled Rope: Autumn Lives

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Autumn Lives

The mornings grow darker now as summer fades into autumn. Already the air is growing colder and the evenings press closer and closer to the late afternoon. The leaves are beginning to take on their autumn colours of reds and golds and browns. Soon the world will narrow into the closer confines of winter where the cold and wind and rain conspire against life trying to carry on.

Until then, though, we have the autumn. Spring and autumn are the better seasons, sharper, one bursting forth into new life. The other wisely ripening into the wisdom of fruitfulness, calm and measured, resigning itself to the inevitability of winter and death.

Here we are though, approaching our own autumn as our children ripen into slow adulthood and fall away from our protecting branches. Somehow, life seems to sip away, evade the grasp and escape off into the deepening undergrowth before you even have the chance to hold it. There and then gone, a flutter glimpsed in the longer grass and then suddenly too far out of reach to ever grasp again. I had it here in my hands for that moment, but I let it slip away.


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