The Principle of Trees in October

In fall the house is cold.

Hardwood floors, curled upward at the baseboards

from summer humidity

and time,

chill my feet from below.

The toe I broke a while back, 

all healed, feels sore.

Even socks can’t warm these feet

and I don’t want to wear shoes

inside.

 

I like to have my nose turn cold, like a steel doorknob

and touch it with the soft skin on my hand

between my thumb and forefinger.

Slightly damp hair chills my neck and back,

the collar of my sweater is cold too.

 

Pattering fingers dance on the white keys

and turn opaque with cold.

My rings slip around and the diamonds fall

to the underside, unseen.

I grasp a cup of coffee, also losing its heat,

and stare transfixed out the drafty panes

and the leaves outside the window are

like a blazing fire.

part-time all the time

I suppose that I could have gotten a full-time job somewhere. I could leave my house at 7:30 and get to work by 8. Stay there until 5 and wear black slacks with button-ups and sweaters. I could have a little cubicle, maybe eventually an office, and work at my computer and talk to "clients" and write memos.

However, as I have never been one to stay indoors and as I couldn't think of a job where I would stay sane inside of an office all day, I have chosen (or been dumped into) a life of part-time jobs.

I work half time as the Youth Director at Hope Church in Winston-Salem. This means that I pick up high school kids from school and take them to Starbucks and the grocery store. I meet with them for Bible study on Wednesdays and teach Sunday school and plan things like lunches and days on orchards to pick apples. 

I try to write for ten hours a week, working on my book. I never achieve ten hours because I don't have the discipline and life happens and it's the first thing I let fly, though writing my novel is my greatest hope and passion. Funny how we let things like that happen--let our passions linger on the sidewalk waiting for us while we keep holding up one finger, saying "one second!" with a look of apology on our faces.

Leading Young Life at Forsyth Country Day School is a volunteer thing, but ends up being another job which I love. Mark and I just got to spend three days at Windy Gap with 56 high school kids from our school and it was incredible.  The other leaders in our area are some of the coolest people I've ever been friends with and I find myself doing work at the YL Office more often than anywhere else.  Today, in fact, as I sat in the corner of Lauren's office, Murf (the area director) came in and, not seeing me, turned off the light. I realized that if I spoke I'd scare him half to death. So I spoke. And watched him teeter as a falling tree when the ax's final blow has severed the trunk. I actually thought he might crumble. We laughed and he apologized desperately for having used the bathroom just beside Lauren's office. "I don't use that bathroom when the girls are here!" he exclaimed. "I am so sorry you had to hear that." Life is a comedy.

My other job, working at the front desk at a local bone and joint doctor's office, is another ten hours a week. Mark calls it my "fun" job, mostly because he knows I spend the whole morning laughing. I work beside Natalie. She's a good girl, born and raised around here in Walnut Cove.  She's married to Russell, has two daughters in high school and college and has worked at the office for over 15 years.  She knows everyone. Somehow every person that migrates through our office has some kind of connection to Natalie or one of her four sisters or her mother. She's always telling me, "Ginny, it's a bad scene." On bad days, when seventy-year-old women wave their umbrellas wildly, refusing to pay their twenty dollar copay, she purses her lips and, in her southern tongue, orders me to follow her to "the closet" (the supply walk-in closet).  Her eyes widen and, breathing fire, she'll call a spade a spade, use choice words to describe the man who demanded a second set of x-rays and the woman who picked twenty-two pieces of candy out of the candy bowl when she herself wasn't even being seen--her son was. Her son is forty.  "It's pitiful," Natalie says. And all I can do is laugh. 

october in winston-salem

It is fall again. For those of you who have followed my blog for at least a year (thanks! What an honor) you know that I am completely besotted with the season that is upon us. The blinds stay open at all times, the windows stay up to welcome the crisp breeze. I have spent countless minutes sitting, staring, out the window above my writing desk. The boys play flag football in the city league every Tuesday night and I pace the sidelines with my arms crossed over my chest in an attempt at warming  up, screaming every so often, and running down the sideline before I can stop myself.  Hannah and I bought the most charming pumpkins at the farmer's market this week and today the leaves are falling, swirling in the breeze. It is my season of joy.

Autumn in West Chester was colder than it is here in North Carolina. I remember vividly running through the park at the end of Hillside Drive, kicking up the piles of leaves collected on the edges of the path. We could play for hours outside, my sister and me, even until dusk.  I have no memory of gloves, only small white fingers turning red, then opaque with cold.  My nose would run and when I reached up to wipe it with the back of my little cold hand, I would laugh at the numbness. The monkey bars, metal and painted yellow, were like ice and after swinging from rung to rung our hands smelled like cold metal. Inside, when it was time for dinner, the house felt so warm and my mother making stew on the stovetop would laugh and make us wash our hands from all of the dirt.  We wore wool sweaters and jeans with saddle shoes, all hand-me-downs; we were ragamuffins with flyaway hair and a bottomless supply of imagination.

The need I feel for the outdoors must have been born all those years ago when we played outside all day.  Our TV was small with a circular knob that could be turned to receive 4 stations.  I wished for cable then, but I am thankful now.

Jonathan, my sister's son, is a year old now. We spend hours outside, picking up acorns and throwing them, examining sticks and bugs, exploring leaves and hoses and mulch.  Hannah says that Jonathan wants to be outside all the time, that he cries and bangs on the door until she lets him free. I feel like that too, and as I sit here on this fall afternoon under this great blue sky, I'm thankful, again, for the season of great joy.