Association is a powerful, powerful thing. It serves so many purposes, but perhaps none so much as the ability to retain a memory. It is an indifferent mistress, neutral in the extreme it cares little whether those memories are good, bad, helpful or painful – it simply serves its purpose, attaching memories and sensations in an intricate web of gossamer slivers of time. It creates for the brain snapshots of consequences, outcomes, decisions good and bad – creating ghosts where none existed before, rekindling flagging fires of past pain so that they can singe their way along embattled nerves time and time again. Warm vignettes of loved ones and joyful experiences ride alongside, caring not which flavor of memory will be summoned next.
Association is capricious, predicting when it might surface is a chancy thing. A tendril of wood smoke on the air, the whiff of a cologne or perfume, the refrain of a favorite though forgotten song, the roll of the ocean or cry of gulls – simple, daily sensations that could be seared permanently into the recesses of your mind simply by adding enough trauma or enough joy. Days on a calendar, seasons of the year, holidays with now-specific significance, brought forth in splendid relief or ruined forever in the space of a heartbeat.
I love autumn, it is far and away my favorite season and has retained that spot my entire life. I love the turning of the wheel, the earth settling to sleep, the blazes of color that come with the land’s spectacular death knell. I got engaged under a spectacular blue sky in autumn, my son learning to say “trick-or-treat,” my daughter’s first horse show, the list of my favorite sights and smells of autumn is long and boring to anyone but myself.
The cusp of autumn also represents the time of year when my notion of family fell apart.
It is standing in the heat of a late August afternoon, staring blankly at the trees and noticing that the leaves were just starting to change - as I listened to the tremor in my father’s voice as he told me my brother had died.
Autumn is the sound of my mother screaming at my father, demanding that he go buy her more wine – trying desperately and deliberately to use the same measures that took her son to drown out the pain of his loss.
Autumn is listening to the strain in my husband’s voice as he made one of the hardest decisions in his life – then watching him be vilified for it by his own children and never once being given the chance to explain … and being unable to stop it.
Autumn is the last time I saw the first two children of my heart, the ones that I accepted unconditionally fourteen years ago and remained content being relegated to the background for.
Autumn is the first time that I had to look at my own children and listen to the question, “When are we going to see them again? “
“Mommy doesn’t know. They don’t want to see us right now and that is their choice.”
Autumn is the beginning of coming to grips with the fact that for whatever the reason, my little ones and I have been discarded – tossed carelessly aside as if we never existed. That because of skew and bias and bureaucracy, bundled with base concepts like greed, anger and retribution, what I thought made up my family was shredded and consigned to picking up scraps and trying to heal undeserved wounds.
I look at the changing leaves and it takes me back to last October, sitting in a hayride with my family … all of my children. The late afternoon sun is slanting over cornfields; the track taking us through some hokey Halloween attractions nestled in the fields along the trail. The kids are flushed and laughing, bouncing on the hay bales. The sun is warm and the air smells like fall, apples and pumpkins, warm sweaters and crunchy hay. It is the quintessential autumn day.
What autumn leaves behind breaks my heart.
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