Changing Seasons on Widowhood Lane

Fall, with all its beauty, has never been one of my favor seasons. Growing up, fall came with an endless supply of leaves that had to be raked each day when I got home from school and when that job was done for the season then we had a dozen old fashioned wooden framed storm windows to wash and exchange for the screens hanging on the house. Those thankless chores didn’t exit from my life until I was almost old enough for Medicare. In fact, raking leaves and dealing with storm windows in the fall expanded to include several more houses as Don’s and my aging parents needed help in the fall. Heck, with his soft spot for old widows Don even got us involved with helping several elderly neighbors with their leaves which I didn’t like doing at the time. Spending so many daylight hours of October raking, burning or hauling leaves wore me right out. In life, everything comes full circle. Now I’m that elderly woman on the block and I’m grateful for the “Don” who lives next door who snow blows my sidewalk. He’s exhibit B in the changing seasons of my life.

The Canadian geese have been flying overhead this week. Bright colors are in the landscape and the days are getting shorter. The cooler temperatures of fall are here and even though I don’t have much to do to get ready for winter, the changing season is making me anxious and sad and missing Don all the more. Maybe it’s remembering autumns past---the work we did getting all his equipment ready for the winter snow removal season. Or maybe it’s the symbolism of leaving summer behind that makes it seem like Don is slipping farther away with each new sign from Mother Nature that life goes on, things change. For every thing there is a season...and Don’s season is truly gone.

And with fall comes the beginning of the holiday season---the first Halloween, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas and the first New Years in forty-two years that I’ll be all alone in the world. It’s a huge Waterloo that we widows have to fight our way through and we equate it with being at the wrong end of Napoleon’s bloody cannon. Cripe! Get out the violins. Grab the hankies. I’m getting overly dramatic again. Woe is me. A pity party is about to start. Broken hearts, lonely nights, and lost loves…yadda, yadda, yadda. I’d write myself a country western song if I had any musical talent. But since I don’t I’ll try my hand at writing a sappy poem instead, try summing up in 50 words or less what it's taken me three paragraphs to say up above:

The rustling leaves of seasons past

Seems to say he won’t be near

For the coming holidays so blue.

He’s riding the winds of yesterday

Caught on the breath of Lady Fall

As she makes hearts as bleak as the

Landscape she hands over to Snow.

So now you have my poem and weekly report penned here on Widowhood Lane where I’m left searching for rhymes. (Hey, anything that takes my mind off from chocolate brownies is a good thing.) And I won’t be able to stop looking until I admit out loud that it was all a waste of time; i.e. it takes more than a lonely old heart to make one into a poet. And deep down, I know it. ©