Autumn, Advent, and the Moon

 In a year when everything seems backwards or slightly out of focus, even the trees are confused, turning at the wrong times, showing the wrong colors. 

“I love your maple, as always,” I say to my neighbor, looking up at a canopy of reddish-yellow leaves, “but I miss the usual bright red.”

“Yes, she surprises us every year,” he says, dismissing the doomsday talk of draught-climate change-someday-we-won’t-see-these-colors-ever-again that play on my mind far too often. “Never quite the same color as the year before.”

I lost track of my word for the year sometime mid-year. Usually, that word is a daily meditation, but as one of my friends wrote to me, “Who but you would have dared to accept a word like ‘focus’ at a time like this?”

She was right, sort of.

Every time I really hit a groove, get into a long-term project, I get interrupted. A student at my door. An e-mail from the chancellor to which I have to respond right away. A text from one of the kids. A call from the school. Another note, another exposure, another scramble to get a COVID test. 

It’s unbearable.

“I never get to focus on anything anymore,” I lament to my spouse, who just raises her eyebrow at me as if to say, and what’s new about that?

My spouse didn’t want to put up the fall decorations this year—at least, not all of them. She didn’t say why, but she's a nurse living on the front lines of COVID. At the end of a year full of exhaustion, a season of too many difficult anniversaries of loss, perhaps dragging out all the boxes felt like just One More Thing.

Still, as the year ends with an off cycle election that has yielded headlines like “Election a Bad Omen for Democrats,” with unusually warm days during which I am frantically finishing outdoor tasks I put off all summer, I can’t help but notice how beautiful everything is.

I can’t help but drive or walk around, in awe of the colors, even if they aren’t as brilliant as other years.

I can’t help but take off my shoes and let dried leaves crumble between my toes.

In the backdrop of this slow-to-end autumn, my grandson is discovering language, after being unable or unwilling to say very much for the first 2.5 years of his life.

Geese! Car! Ball! Ketchup! Milk! Baby! Tree! Dog! Again and again, he recites the words he knows with such delicious joy that I can’t help feeling grateful for—well, everything.

He puts up his hands, as if evoking everything that is larger than himself, and waves them rapidly—Yiayia, did you see this? Sometimes his whole body shakes. He is so focused on whatever he is beholding, however banal, to the point where he literally trembles with joy. And, he wants everyone else to see it, too.

One morning I put the leashes on the dog as I do every morning. He was running around the living room, joyously proclaiming the names of everything that is always there—couch, chair, pillow, dog, cat, window—when he stopped. Yiayia go? He asked, and I said I was just letting the dogs out. He followed me out.

It was a clear morning. When we got out onto the sidewalk, he suddenly became very still. I turned to look at him, distracted by the dogs pulling on me, and observed him staring straight up into the sky.

“Look,” he said, quietly, his voice breathy with wonder.

“Those are stars,” I tell him.

“Stars,” he repeats. Instead of trembling, he’s still, looking up in wonder.

He points to the moon. It is a half-moon, reddish-yellow like the maple leaves down the street.

“Moon,” I say.

“Moon, moon, moon,” he repeats, like an incantation.

And since then, every morning, he’s wanted to see the moon. Every morning before his mom takes him to daycare he takes my hand, leads me to the dog’s leashes, and says, “Walk.” So, my autumn was marked by shepherding my grandson through the moon’s slow changes.

On the new moon day, instead of his usual quiet morning awe, he scans the sky frantically. “Moon? Moon? Moon?” he asks over and over, until I catch him and lift him and look him in the eye.

“Today is a new moon. When it’s a new moon, the sky is dark, the stars are brighter, and the moon is resting.”

“New moon,” he repeats, nodding. He wiggles out of my embrace. He runs in circles in the darkness, shouting, “New moon! New moon! New moon!”

I watch him. Really watch him. I feel my mind wander to the fact that I need to get the other kids up soon, that I haven’t made my breakfast yet, that I forgot to send an e-mail the night before.

And then he says—and I swear he did this—“Focus!” He’s likely heard me say this to the 6^th graders (his uncle/aunt who are more like his siblings) when they are wandering away from whatever it is I’ve asked them to do. He’s probably heard me say it to myself when I’ve forgotten why I wandered into a room, or when I am in making supper amidst interruption after interruption. But I’ve never heard him say it before.

I look up the sky and really focus. He lifts his arms and says, “Up,” and I lift him again, and he leans in and rests his cheek against mine.

Focus: the state or quality of having or producing clear vision.

The point of convergence.

The next day, I'll come home to the fall decorations out for the Thanksgiving holiday, a solitary ritual my spouse took on during her day off. "I knew it would make you happy," she says, and a week later, she'll be helping me drag out the Christmas things on an unseasonably warm first day of Advent. 

But for now, my grandson and I are frozen in time, looking up. 

The feel of a cheek pressed against my own. The autumn morning air tingling against my bare arms. The scent of leaves disintegrating. The promise of Advent just over the horizon. The clear, star-filled sky.