I heard the phrase “shoulder season” the other day, and it stuck with me. Fall is one of the slim ends of the year, a turning point. The days have darkened earlier in dramatic fashion, leaves have changed kaleidoscopically from green to yellow, started falling. The morning air is now cool and damp when yesterday the cat sunned herself on the flagstones. Fall turns easily, like a shoulder joint it’s flexible. But a shoulder joint is also the most unstable joint in the body. So is weather at the edges.
Wind blows the ghost I hung on the tree in front of my house. It hangs over the white fence and onto the road so people going by can see it. So I can see it every time I come home. I bought a huge white pumpkin and put it under my mailbox, decorated the post with dried corn stalks, and tied a prehistoric looking skeleton of a snake to the top of the fence. My new neighbors across the street have young kids that I hope see my house out of their bedroom windows, and wonder. I love Halloween for its celebration of the dark, of souls and the dead, the mystery.
A shoulder season could refer to parenting adult children as well as the weather. Mine are grown and out of the house, and yet we are still attached like more arms swinging from my shoulders. I hold my breath as they rotate around this world, no longer in control of their choices, their lives. It’s a short season, these young adults starting out, not quite independent, but not needing me the same as when they were children or adolescents. Those were long seasons that weathered me, that defined me.
Parenting today conditions us for attachment, not separation. I feel pain almost like dislocation at times, living in a world where technology has eliminated an out of sight out of mind sense of relief. Maybe this shoulder season will remind me to let go, as trees let go of their leaves, so I can learn to parent less and listen more as they make their own way. Like I listen to the rain, while fall hurries towards winter.
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