The Beautiful Macabre (#133)
Is it an end or a beginning?
I look in the mirror, catching my weary look and blow the wayward tuft of bang from my eyes. The light from the vanity bulb catches a few strands - a few more than last year, to be sure. The silver strands in my hair too are luminous with life, still pliable.
I head outside and settle into an Adirondack chair in the shade. I close my eyes and take a break; a break from editing, discarding, and packing up a decade of living, in anticipation of our own autumnal migration. To move to another phase of life, not marked by growth, but decline.
“How maudlin,” I think. Yet I’ve found myself in a surprise state of bittersweet: happy to have found a new place that meets new needs; sad to leave good neighbours.
I tilt back and look up at the sky.
The sunlight illuminates the amber and gold leaves that still cling to the thin branches of the sugar maple outside my (soon-to-be former) house. We’ve given her a few trims over the past decade yet soon she will be someone else’s shade and colour.
This is the paradox of the spooky season. Decorations lean into the loss of pigment as a marker of the macabre, to invoke fright and dread. How can it be, that the vanishing chlorophyll that gives way to scarlets and golds, or the gold in my hair that fades to another precious metal, is a death knell?
Even as each leaf finally lets go to softly fall, onto the grass or my fading locks, they still feel soft and supple. Her bare bones can still host tire swings and bases for tree forts. Her blood can boil into molten decadence for weekend breakfasts. Her skin provides shelter for mosses and ants. Her roots, full of knowledge, keep the terra firm. She still holds life and has much to give, even through the winter.
I get up from the chair and walk back into the house to pack away my own artefacts and bones.
She still holds life, and so do I.
Hope the move has gone smoothly!
An excellent contemplative post, Bryn. 🍂🍁