Profits and Losses

This very grey morning I pulled on my old grey shirt, comfy grey jeans and grimy black shoes to face unpleasant outdoor chores. It was a gloomy Pacific Northwest morning, one of hundreds I expect to see between now and the return of regular sunshine around the middle of next year. First I stood on a precariously balanced ladder sawing a ten-foot long crabapple branch off my gangly tree so that I would no longer hear the scritch-scritch-scree of it scratching against my house on windy nights. Next, I dragged and wrestled the branch into submission, all the while discombobulating several of the many giant striped spiders who are currently staking out their territories throughout my garden. Their large webs and long, invisible connecting strands keep ending up across my startled face and throughout my hair; I walked directly into several today. Then, absentmindedly introducing bits of dead leaves into my coiffure while simultaneously pulling cobwebbing out of my eyebrows, I ambled around to the front garden where I cleaned the gutter over my front porch, all the while soiling my coat, hands and face with grimy, slimy gutter debris. For my grand finale, I managed to slosh a great wave of filthy water all over my head while my head was tilted back, which meant I flung a nice big burst of wet putrescence up my nose as well. Lovely!

As I stood in my garden, filthy and dripping and surveying all the decaying leaves and yellowing stalks that I don't look forward to gathering over the coming weeks, I sighed and thought, ah yes, the season of losses has come around again.

At this time of year, it is easy for me to focus on endings and losses, things cherished and vanished, possibilities unfulfilled. Over the course of my life, October has meant experiences of very real pain, fear and loss, including the death of someone precious to me and two friends' motorcycle accidents that ended up changing their lives. It also means the end of warmth and sunshine, of fresh green growth in the garden, and the coming of darkening days, gloom, storms and mess, expensive repairs, and the hunkering down of people in their homes so that happy, random exchanges with neighbors grow few and far between.

This autumn brought additional personal losses and disappointments for me, one after the other, in a melancholy parade of angst-filled events even before and apart from the crushing financial losses we're all looking at. Millions of us will be making less money this fall and winter while expenses remain high and chances for new sources of income dwindle. Savings contract frighteningly, credit is withdrawn, costs rise and fears for the future abound. Like so many people, I've put off home repairs, fixing my wonky computer, scheduling dental work and many other expenses that I would normally take care of with alacrity in attempts to stretch what's left of my money as far as I can. The job opportunities I expected this fall have dried up due to caution on the part of the corporations and nonprofits I had hoped to work with, so the hopes I had for a less gloomy autumn continue to be dashed with some regularity.

And yet—

Grim as the world, the weather, my financial and career forecasts and my home's gutters all appear to be, I find signs of hope, fresh growth and new possibilities in my garden, in my future work, and in the ways in which I look at life. The spiders, huge and looming, will die off this fall, but they're spinning egg sacs and tucking them all over the garden so the darling tiny spiders can pop out in the spring and keep the pests from wrecking my garden and overtaking my home. The plants whose leaves yellow and wither so sadly reward closer inspection with evidence of tiny budlets that will burst into fresh growth next year. Brilliant red rose hips, so popular with birds, dot the tall pine tree to which I've tied tall, thorny rose canes, and purple-black berries beckon other birds to gorge before the frosts come. Hummingbirds still seek out my blushing fuchsias, and yesterday a sleek, silent doe and her adolescent daughter foraged for food a hundred feet from my front door; we stared at each other for a long while, me in delighted fascination, they in wise wariness, before they slipped into the forest.

Much as I'd love to dine in fine restaurants and take my daughter away to elegant weekend retreats, we're enjoying cooking and baking and cuddling up at home. The memory of our week in Québec this summer is fresh and lovely and there are enough exciting books, films and day trips available to us that we can keep our hunger for fresh travels at bay as long as we have to. Libraries and boxes of art supplies feed our hunger for novelty. Pretty new fashions are delightful, but the hunt for hidden treasures at consignment shops (and for forgotten treats in our overstuffed closets) will suffice. We're sewing more and repurposing found objects in original ways. We've cut our expenses and will have to cut even more, but there actually is some pleasure in seeing that it can be done, that discipline pays off, and that, as a society, we are using less and making do with what we have more often, and recognizing the value in frugality and conservation in ways we wouldn't have had we not experienced this international crisis.

As I age, I also recognize cycles and remember going through upheavals, losses, downturns and disappointments before. I sigh to think that I must once again go through the painful experiences I thought I'd worked my way through for good, but I also know that they can be gotten through, that aches and pains and bills and mistakes come and go. Nothing lasts forever, and that includes suffering. Yes, I'm older, so sometimes the aches last longer, the financial losses are larger, the opportunity costs of choosing one road over another are greater, and some options will simply never again be available. Some relationships can never be the way I hoped they would be, for they morph too much, or stay too much the same, or are based in needs or expectations that aren't understood or expressed at the outset and which we can do nothing to meet once we recognize them. We can't always know what we will most need before we need it. We can't always map out the roads we take before we get halfway through our journeys and find that we can't back up without suffering extreme tire damage.

But when the road above washes out, a new one is created further down the mountain. Friends wander away, but some come back. Sometimes we wander off for a while to regroup and rethink, and we hope that the more often we do so, the more compassionate we become as life lessons show us that everyone is scared, everyone suffers, everyone wonders and wanders off at times. The more dark autumns we enter into, the more firmly we hope to remember how inevitably and inexorably spring returns, that while friendships change and grow and die, new ones bud, too, even during the darker seasons. And sometimes the old friendships with their gnarls and scars and ripped up roots put out new shoots when we'd given them up for good.

So we retrench our lives, our gardens, our jobs and relationships, and remember how many promising new starts in our lives grew out of our composted past, and how many losses led to profitable lessons upon which we later planted new hopes, and nourished new dreams.