first autumn

Someday, I'll look back through journals and think about why things got so quiet in the last months of this year.  It was a Friday when we learned you were you and it was five or six Fridays later when I was crying on the phone to my mother because I was so certain I'd never survive a winter of feeling so fearful.  She asked if I was walking, if I was writing.

It was a Saturday when I decided we would take a walk along the canal path in the early morning hours, as the fog lifted from the water.  After, I sat in the coffee shop with a pot of tea and my notebook before setting off for the sort of errands Saturday brings.

Saturday again, one week later, and I bundled with layers and hats and gloves for a twenty-eight degree morning.  I walked past runners and piles of leaves and saw the first hints of ice glazed upon the water.  It felt like the first threads of routine and tradition being knit together and I imagined it's how we might spend Saturdays 'til June and beyond.

It's been the most difficult part of these past months, our first autumn together -- to be someone's first home, to feel so fearful it might all disappear.  To find the bits and bursts of joy wherever they might be.