The First Weekend

October 10, 2004 | Category: Family, It's a Trip

Fall is our season, me and Bear's.

I was a stay at home mom and he was a newborn in the fall of 2000. I pushed him marathons of miles on those city sidewalks deep with leaves. We were bundled against the brisk wind, and would often stop at the local coffee shop to breathe in the warm steam.

After that, it was set. It gets colder, and Bear and I seem to reconnect.

I remember last year, one afternoon, Bear came up to me and announced that we should rake the leaves. So out we went, and for crisp sunny hours we built and destroyed the same piles over and over.

This weekend felt like the first real weekend of autumn. The chill has settled into the mornings, although the days are fine. The leaves have just begun to turn.

With CD working, Bear and I indulged ourselves. Friday night we grabbed a flashlight and walked for almost 2 hours around the neighborhood admiring all the Halloween displays.

Everywhere else is amateur league it seems, compared to here - my own personal Pleasantville. Here, people decorate for each season as if, at any time, a truck could come by and haul your house off to be in a parade. Bear and I admired the dozens of displays, the colored lights and ghosts and giant spiderwebs. The orange spotlights on scarecrows and pumpkins.

Saturday we dawdled for hours, playing at the park and leting Bear ride his bike along the sidewalks with first fallen leaves crunching beneath his wheels. His Spiderman backpack filled with a snack, and his PowerRanger sword from his costume near at hand, in case an Immortal should suddenly appear and need to be dueled.

Today we snuggled at home, he dressed in full Blue Power Ranger kit and me, well, not. He dragged over a chair and helped me finally clear out the backlog of dishes. We made apple smelling suds with Dawn and scrubbed side by side, playing an alphabet game - coming up with as many words as we could for a particular sound.

At bedtime, he pulled over his current favorite book - a poem by James Riley - and we read it together, the words we've almost got down by heart. These are the days that take the sting out of the rest of life. It was a good weekend. It was a great weekend. And I think? We both needed one.

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here --
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock --
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries -- kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below -- the clover over-head! --
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

From: WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN, by James Whitcomb Riley

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