The Face of Beauty

Bertha Myrtle Rule as a young woman

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

I stole that quotation from August McLaughlin and her Beauty of a Woman Blogfest.  She celebrates the beauty in all of us with each post, but for the blogfest she asked others to join.  While I was too late to enter the blogfest, it did send me back a couple of years to resurrect a piece on aging I wrote and promptly filed away.  So today I join others in honoring beauty in all its forms.

I’ll also try to hold Emerson’s words tight as I head back to the gym to lose the weight I’ve gained during this five-year roadblock of pain.  When I see myself in the mirrors by the free weights, I will look not at my chicken wings flapping in the breeze, but I’ll use my X-ray vision to see the beautiful triceps and biceps still hiding under there – waiting to come to the surface again. 

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“You have a fit face.  I wouldn’t do anything to it yet,” a plastic surgeon told my older sister.  She and the other nurses at her hospital are always asking the plastic surgeons about different procedures.  At an online news site I read this week about a 50-something woman who had an expansive list of surgeries in order to look more like her daughter.

Yesterday I looked in the mirror and for the first time noticed some newly formed canyons settling into my forehead.  My options for erasing these are limited because just about everything I could plaster over them to “cure” aging would make my face break out in hives that will radiate all the way down to my stomach.  But I look again in the mirror and wonder why would I want to change anything.  For every plastic surgery procedure I could have, I would look less and less like all of those people I love and who made me what I am.  I will never be tall, thin, and with sharply defined features.

I am my Grandma.  We have a photo of her sitting on the porch railing of the house of a family she worked for most of her young life.  Her father sent her there in her early teens because they had no money and her mother was mentally ill.  This family took her in, sent her through high school, dressed her in the beautiful white summer dress she wore in the photo, treated her like family.  And when I look at my 18-year old Grandma sitting on that porch on a summer afternoon, I see myself.  And I see my sisters, all of us when we were 18.  And I still see Grandma when I sit at the table for a family celebration.

Our faces are too round, and our noses are too snub.  We got her thighs instead of my mom’s long, thin legs.  But we also got her fair, smooth skin.  I know that when I’m 96 my mind will be sharp and my eyes clear.  I will be a little too hard on those I care about the most, but I will also have the spirit to thrive up to the end.  I’ll probably be even shorter than I am now, shrinking a smidgen each year like she did.

No, I don’t think I’ll fight aging.  Other than trying to take care of my health, adding a little hair color, and using an SPF 30 daytime moisturizer and a gentle night cream, I think I’ll just let nature take its course.  I like looking in the mirror and seeing all the people I’ve loved.

What is beauty? What does it mean to you? When do you feel beautiful? Share your own stories on the beauty of a woman then head over to August’s website to read the fabulous entries.

And while we're on the subject of beauty, visit this post from April 2010 about an unexpected moment of beauty that interrupted a normally chaotic day.

When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear . . .

. . . gladiator sandals in France, no matter the age of the woman

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple …” warned poet Jenny Joseph.  She wrote it during an era that women got married, had children, managed households, cut their hair short, and wore incredibly sensible outfits.  Now, we have mothers competing with daughters over who can wear their jeans tighter or their heels higher.  At the opposite spectrum, I can walk into a grocery store and see so many women my age who have surrendered their style to gray fleece comfort.  “Please,” I pray, “don’t let me look like I’ve given up on life.”

My trips to France inspire me because I can travel the entire country and not see one woman in sweat pants or athletic shoes.  They may not be dressed in purple, but they all have style, that unique sense of who they are and what they want to say with their clothes.  There are not teenager clothes here and old lady clothes there in the stores.  There are just beautiful clothes that make you feel like you could float down the street.  Even just draping one of their colorful scarves around my neck quickens my step at home today.

The idea that you don’t have to capitulate to your age is the topic of a fun blog, Advanced Style, by Ari Seth Cohen.  He’s working on a documentary (see the video below) about the uniquely fashionable women of a certain age who stroll the sidewalks of New York City.  One of his spirited characters declares “I dress for the theater of my life every day.”

“Theater of my life.”  What a wonderful sentiment.  My favorite costume ever for my own theater was a jacket I bought when I first became an assistant professor.
 
I bought the jacket when I first started earning real money and didn’t have to shop discount. The wool-blend piece, sans lapels, was adorned with quarter-sized flat pearl buttons down the front and smaller versions on the cuffs.  With bold, oversized black-and-white houndstooth checks, it trumpeted my arrival with threads of fuchsia, pumpkin orange, teal, and Easter-grass green woven through the black rows.

Close-up details

It marked that I had arrived where I wanted to be in my academic profession.  It set me apart from the typical university wardrobe of olive tweeds and sensible shoes.  I wore it over knit dresses and I wore it with skirts and slacks.  I wore it to mark the blossoming of spring and I wore it to brighten a dreary winter day.  And I wore it because I planned on standing out in my world.  And it did the trick.

On one of the last days I wore it one of my female academic gods walked up to me at an evening party at a professional conference and told me that she like this jacket much better than the blue one I had worn that afternoon at my presentation.  I was floored.  Of course, I would have preferred she told me what she had thought about theories actually raised in my talk, but for now this was enough.  She had been there and she knew who I was and she had noticed.  Next year would be soon enough to dazzle her with my brilliant analysis of the work she had published. 

But next year didn’t come.  I found out I couldn’t have it all.  The children my husband and I had adopted needed me more.  I knew where I had to be.  So I let go of that life I had thought was my destiny for the life that was my reality.  But I couldn’t let go of that jacket.

Fifteen years later it barely fits, but it still hangs there in a back corner of my closet.  Some days it mocks me with what I once was; some days it reminds me of whom I could still be.  But mostly it reminds me not to wait until old to live a life colored in shades of purple, or fuchsia, or teal.  My daughter recently told me I was wearing “mom” glasses.  I think I’ll go out next week and find new frames in blue or green or leopard print.  And maybe I’ll buy some red shoes.

My jacket and my rainbow of scarves from France

What’s in the back of your closet to remind you of another you? What do you wear that wakes you up and makes you feel young, that makes you ready to face the theater of your life?  Or do you dress strictly for comfort and efficiency?  Which is your favorite stylish lady in Cohen’s video?  Do you wear hats? What about men of a certain age and their fashion choices?  Give us your fashion philosophy in the comments box.

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A Reflection On My Mirror Image

Skyler says, "Things are looking up around here now that Mom can pick me up again and put me in the car

to go places.  I was getting bored."

One of the most horrendous side effects of my recent surgery and recovery was to realize that I am old.  Not “getting older.”  Not “aging gracefully.”  But old.  I now find myself drawn into those infomercials for Lifestyle Lifts, or the French cantaloupe miracle face creams that will make me look like super-model Cindy Crawford, or those electronic devices that will remove hair from places that only my grandmother had to worry about.  I am old.  Mirror, mirror in my hand, who’s the oldest in the land?

After the cervical fusion I could turn my neck only slightly to the left or right, and not up or down at all.  This lack of mobility made it difficult to handle such grooming routines as styling my hair, changing pierced earrings, or searching for errant dog hairs that took up residence in my eye.  I couldn’t comfortably lean in over the vanity in order to move closer to the bathroom mirror for any of these tasks.  I decided my best solution was a new hand mirror.

I bought one with 10x magnification on one of the sides.  That’s when I discovered a mustache growing above my upper lip that had to be a cousin to – or even a twin of – that thick patch of hair growing above Geraldo Rivera’s mouth.  How could I be so blind?  Had it been hidden by some anti-aging rose-colored glasses?  But now I see.  It’s a veritable forest of luxuriously long facial hairs waving in the breeze, so numerous that they could never be tamed simply with a pair of tweezers. With the help of my new 10x personal jumbotron I even found one of those wicked creatures trying to plant its flag and stake a claim in my chin.

Self-portrait post surgery with swollen face, cervical collar, and bone growth stimulator

But that’s not all.  Oh no, I’m even older than my mustache lets on.  In fact, I must be as old as the moon because surely those things called “pores” are as deep as those craters we see on a summer night with our telescope.  The blood vessels on my chin (I’m sure courtesy of my Grandma’s rosacea) flash like Las Vegas neon, spreading out across my fair skin like the Amazon River and all its tributaries.  My eyes somehow have become framed by the miles-deep canyons of the American Southwest.  And while I was willing to admit to the two or three small age spots on my cheek and brow, I now see that it is really a dozen small Saharas spreading quickly across the landscape of my face.

Where would I draw my own line now in resisting this newly discovered downward spiral?

I’m trying not to fixate on the magnified side of my mirror, to return to the regular side and my attitude that, although I don’t look twenty-five anymore, my face also doesn’t look like I spent my life puffing on cigarettes while frying in the sun.  I look good enough when I walk out the door each day.  I make the effort to do the best with what I’m given.

What’s a mirror image anyway?  It’s the reflected duplication of an image, but in reverse.  That piece of silvered glass shows me my age . . . decay . . . every fault.  I know that’s me inside the red frame I hold in my hand; I recognize myself.  However, it’s just an imitation.  The real me – the reverse of that reflection – isn’t aging as quickly on the inside, the part the mirror can’t see.  I finally returned to yoga class after almost two months of inactive recuperation and found that I could still stand strong in my tree pose, and I left more energized that when I had arrived.  I have a new pile of books to read to keep my mind agile.  I’m thinking about where I’ll travel next because curiosity about new places, in my opinion, is a better youth tonic than Retin-A.

I’m starting to make friends with what I found under the 10x magnification.  There might be a few things I can do to spruce up that version of Julie that aren’t the equivalent of knocking out a load-bearing wall in a home renovation project. But for the most part I think I’ll continue to put my focus on the self I can’t see, the one looking out on the world through what I now know are clearly aging eyes.  That one is easier to improve than the magnified mirrored image I saw. 

What makes you feel older?  Where do you focus your attention or energy when you want to feel younger?  My oldest friend and I used to joke that we never felt our real age (until recently).  What age do you usually feel?  Please share your thoughts on aging or your favorite “anti-aging” technique in the comments box.

The best way to get younger, Skyler and I think, is to head out for a good walk with good scenery

(our first excursion post-surgery)

I’ve been MIA on a large scale since my cervical fusion surgery.  I’ve been MIA on my blog, on e-mail, on Facebook, on Twitter, on websites of friends and organizations that continue to post compelling things I should be reading but have passed me by.  Time – and the internet – wait for no man or woman.  The surgery went fine.  I felt improvement the moment the anesthesia wore off.  What has kept me down for so long was a steady stream of physical ailments, one after another, that flat laid me out on the couch, no energy even to read.  Focusing my eyes on a computer screen seemed like too much effort.  But I’ve started physical therapy and feel back on track.  I hope to catch up with all of you soon.

  

 

Birthday Wisdom

I know I've posted this before, but it's one of my favorite photos.  Tonya never had a bigger grin in her life than on her first birthday in the United States when she found out about this wonderful tradition of showering birthday girls with love and attention and presents.

“Today is my birthday and all that I want
Is to dig through this big box of pictures
In my kitchen ‘til the daylight’s gone”
-- Kristian Bush/Jennifer Nettles “Very Last Country Song”

     Yes, today is my birthday.  But not just mine.  My daughter and I have shared this special day for the last fifteen years.  Being born on the same day made us so much alike (a blessing and a curse), but we absolutely stand at polar opposites when it comes to the menu for our birthday feast.  She wants steak and a plain cake with minimal or no icing; I want the dinner my mother always fed me – fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy – plus a gooey, sweet Black Forest Cake or something similar with enormous amounts of sugar.  As a good parent, however, I made the ultimate sacrifice for my child and usually gave up my favorite food for the sake of her birthday dinner.

    Now, with my daughter several hundred miles away at school, I’m going to have myself a carb-laden fried chicken blowout for my birthday (and yes – to answer my sister – there will be lots of gravy).  But I’ll also be thinking of T on our special day.  Since one thing we have in common is a love of music, I’m sending her some words from our favorite singers to live by in the coming year.  And you might find something that hits you just so as well.

Help me if you can/ I’m feeling down/ and I do appreciate you being round
-- John Lennon/ Paul McCartney “Help”
Just remember, T, it’s not a sign of weakness to ask for help.  The world is full of people with wonderful experiences and bucketfuls of knowledge that mean we never have to reinvent the wheel.  If someone gives advice, that doesn’t mean he or she is trying to run your life.  Let someone else carry part of the load sometimes.

Guess what, honey, clothes don’t just wash themselves!/ Neither do dishes, neither does the bathroom floor// So, now if anyone asks, not that they would/ I’ll be down in Mississippi and up to no good
-- Kristian Bush/Kristen Hall/Jennifer Nettles “Down In Mississippi”
Keep this one in reserve for when you have a child of your own.  For myself, I’d change it to “I’ll be at a Keith Urban concert and up to no good.”  But you already know that.

And speaking of KU –
Days go by/ I can feel ‘em flying/ Like a hand out the wind as the cars go by
-- Monty Powell and Keith Urban “Days Go By”
We sang this at so many concerts.  Don’t get so caught up in making all your plans for the future that you forget to roll down the window and stick that hand out.  Right now is just as important as tomorrow and next year.  Don’t be too impatient; you’ll get there soon enough.

I know you can hear me/ You don’t have to say a thing/ My love is stronger, lasts a lot longer/ Than your anger or your pain
-- Radney Foster “I Know You Can Hear Me”
During that first year after the adoption when we were learning to be a family, your dad was trying to make you sit on the stairs for a two-minute time out.  You fought every second of it – refusing to listen, testing our commitment to you, and daring us not to love you.  You later asked your dad in a jumbled mix of English and Russian if we were going to send you back because we were angry.  Well, like it or not we’re in this for the long haul.  But the road has gotten less bumpy, don’t you think?

Life is short/Even on its longest day
-- John Mellencamp “Longest Day”
This will mean a lot more thirty years down the line when you’re my age.  So hang onto it for the time when you’ll need it.

     After I make a phone call to my favorite birthday partner today, I’ll put on some music and heat up the oil for my decadent delight.  I’ll think about past years and perhaps pull out those pictures.  And I’ll start planning for many more.  Happy Birthday to me.

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Please don't retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.


Italian actress Anna Magnani

They say that age is all in your mind. The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body.


Anonymous


If you have any great birthday quotes or words of wisdom passed on to you or that you tried to share with your own children – or any great birthday story – share them in the comment box here.  Thanks for reading and sharing.
 

Everybody Pogo!

Country singer Keith Urban jumps for joy

As I finished walking Skyler around the lagoon and Grand Basin at Forest Park and was heading back to the car, my eye was caught by bright mango yellow shirts shooting into the air in a fit of randomness in the shade of tall oak trees.  Despite the July St. Louis heat, a group of grade school camp kids were all exhibiting their most energetic jumping jacks before hopping on their bikes for a spin around the park.

When did I stop jumping?  When was the last time that I flexed my knees and then propelled myself into the air like a rocket again and again?  Do I always have two feet planted firmly on the ground?  And why is that seen as a good thing?  I remember hot summer nights after dinner when all the kids in the neighborhood competed to see who could bounce the highest or the most times on our pogo stick.  Onetwothreefourfive . . . onehundredandfive . . .  We jumped without a moment’s thought to bad arches, or aching sacroiliac joints, or old knees.  We pogoed the length of our street and shot into the stratosphere with little concern for balance or control.

We just jumped again and again for the sensation of escaping gravity and flying into the air.  Even if just for an instant before we were yanked back to the reality of solid ground.  Jumping jacks.  Hurdles.  High jump bars in gym class.  Puddles. Tops of front stoops to the sidewalk. Ledges and fences.  Hardly a day passed that we didn’t launch our body into space and hang there for one . . . two beautiful seconds before we collided with the earth, but then brushed ourselves off and kept moving.

Did I stop jumping because I grew old and my joints began to ache?  Or did I stop long before that?  Did I just get too busy to think about jumping?

The other week at the gym I tried some tentative jumping jacks.  There was no mighty leap, legs and arms spread wide.  It was more a shuffle and a lifting of the heels, but not quite both feet off the ground simultaneously.  Before I even crouched for the attempt, the brain cringed and said, “You know this is going to hurt.  This is high impact aerobics.  Your feet will ache for a week.  Watch that your knee doesn’t give out when you touch down.  And what about your shoulder?  All that swinging up and down is definitely going to inflame that shoulder again.”

It’s no wonder with such anticipation of pain that I looked like an elephant attempting “Swan Lake” instead of someone jumping for joy.

My favorite performer, Keith Urban, has a moment in every concert – just when you think the show is over and he’s about to strike the last chord – that he regroups, ups the tempo, and starts leaping across the stage on an invisible pogo stick while shredding on his guitar.  Everyone in his band starts jumping like they’re twelve and it’s a warm summer evening.  Pretty soon 10,000 people in the audience are doing the best they can to keep up with him.  For those few seconds everyone is truly jumping for joy and with abandon.

How many other ways in an average day or week do I convince myself that I can’t “jump”?  In how many ways do I hold myself back from something that could be wonderful because that little voice keeps telling me that some pain will surely follow any leap into the air?  I let the landing mean more than the flying.

As you read this, I’ll be on my way to France.  I can predict any number of opportunities to leap.  For one, I have a car and a map and will navigate a solo trip to the Loire Valley.  And I can imagine the hurdles and cliffs I may trip over on the way, considering I speak very bad French.  But it seems as good a time as any to start focusing more on flying and less on landing with a painful thud.  “Just jump,” I’ll remind myself every time I encounter a fence or a puddle.  As my French friend Martine said to me, “C’est l’aventure!”

Keith Urban and Friends 

When was the last time both of your feet left the ground (literally or metaphorically)?  Share your best "jumps" in the comment box.

Joyeux Anniversaire à Moi

My 52nd birthday is today.  The first part I wrote a bit ago, while the second part is very much in the here and now.
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Dateline: Dijon 2007
Today I turn 50 years old. I’m working at my computer in the silent attic bedroom of the apartment at 30 rue Verrerie, in Dijon, FR. I’m alone because Brad is in Tunisia for the week doing research with other mathematicians. I’m trying to figure out what 50 is supposed to feel like. I’m only a few years away from my mother’s age when she died. What did she feel like at fifty? I know what she seemed like to me. She still laughed easily because her illness had not yet consumed her spirit or her energy. But at 50 she was already old on most days. She looked tired, and probably was. She came from a generation that let its hair go gray and wore sensible shoes by 40. They were wives and mothers. They didn’t exercise, ride bikes, take trips with “the girls,” or define themselves beyond what they gave to everyone else. If they had hopes and dreams and urges to bust out of routine, for the most part they kept it to themselves.

My Grandma (Dad’s mother) was even older at a younger age. In photographs of her with my father as a child, she looked 50 by the time she was 30. Her shoes were orthopedic, and her hair was in a perpetual bun until her 80’s. A product of a hard country life and the Depression, life was about one’s work ethic more than leisure or pleasure. I’m fairly certain she had moments of joy and contentment, but mostly I remember she was always busy at something – sewing, cooking, mending, cleaning, gardening . . . you know – doing. Did 50 feel any different for her than 40 or 70? I know visits from her great-grandchildren brought a smile to her face, but did she pass on at 94 with unrealized dreams? Did she feel the desire at 50 or thereafter to proclaim that it was finally “me time”?

                    Bertha Myrtle Farrar                                                               Ellen Francis Farrar

I don't mind being alone on my birthday because the best present of all is to not have to respond to the needs of anyone or anything for 24 hours. My day’s plans extend no further than anticipating the dame blanche at my favorite brasserie with which I will reward myself for achieving this milestone. The ice cream will be tongue-numbing cold and the fresh chantilly (whipped cream) will snake around until its mountainous shape hides all the sweet scoops and chocolate sauce beneath it. I luxuriate in the wonderful freedom of not having to negotiate any emotional boundaries with those I love with all my heart. Life’s net of negotiation and compromise can tangle us and pull us down. However, when done as part of the life dance for our roles as wife/mother/friend we can reap rewards that lift us up. Occasionally, though, we want simply to twirl alone, spinning faster this way and changing course and speed to twirl slower that way, to stumble across the floor while temporarily losing our “spotting” mark until regaining balance and eventually finding ourselves centered and still, ready to begin another pas de deux with those who fill the stage of our lives.

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Dateline: St. Louis 2009
Does each generation grow bolder? I’ve gone farther than my Mom probably would ever have dreamed of for herself – or even for me, her youngest daughter. But my own daughter, thirty years younger than I am, already is preparing to go farther than I would have dared at her age. Not even finished with college yet she readies herself for a journey to Russia alone in January for a semester of school, with challenges beyond the cold and language that we can’t even envision. We share the same birthday, three decades apart. I wonder in what distant place she’ll find herself at 50 since she seems permanently shod in a pair of travelin’ shoes. I watch in amazement as she audaciously charges through the world in a way that I still can’t, just assuming that she belongs in the middle of it all.

In recognition of our shared celebration, I wish her un 22nd anniversaire très joyeux et bon journée.

Tonya Margaret Currey

My Autumn Color

Autumn in Dijon

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Apricot, burgundy, sunshine gold, rust. Autumn is such a drama queen. It’s impossible to ignore it. A bush that has been invisible for most of the year in its drab, green sameness jumps out of hiding wearing a coat of flaming red. No summer garden in full flower can even compete against a maple tree with its orange crown or a golden yellow ginko against a robin’s egg blue sky.

The autumn chill, though, is starting to invade my bones. It’s not just the incessant rain that brings on a creeping cold and dread of winter. No, the chill originates inside as much as out. My feet hurt. My knees ache. My shoulder doesn’t want to rotate like it should. If I sit in one place for too long my back moans. I feel my own autumn coming on.

I’m an autumn child. Born in this season of extravagant colors I feel the energy that they imbue. As another birthday peeks around the corner, beckoning me forward into the unknown, I do sense my own “chlorophyll” slowing down. The green of my summer is disappearing little by little. However, I’ve stored copious amounts of anthocyanin and carotenoids over my life. These are the stuff that bring on the intensity of the fall. As my own sun starts to hang a little lower over the horizon I want to burst forth in brilliant rainbows of golds and oranges and reds. I plan on hanging tightly to the tree limb until the last possible moment and then drift slowly down the street on an autumn wind until I gently settle on the ground to decompose and provide food for the next generation of trees.

Trick-or-treating in Dijon, 2007. The children (some in costumes, some not) travel from store to store in search of bonbons


Dijon is in full flower until the deepest of winter. "Trees" of mums in autumn colors decorate every public intersection and often cascade to the ground 

Visit the comments box and tell us what season you identify the most and why.

Autumn Chores

Almost immediately I saw it – a peregrine falcon – perched on the tangled branches of my giant viburnum bush. The muted, mottled coloring of its back made it almost invisible amid the gray limbs and fading leaves. While its back was toward me, however, his head turned sot that his black, unblinking eyes were also boring straight into me. I saw those eyes and the dangerous hook of a beak meant for ripping into meat rather than slurping worms. Its still, gray body was on alert, so I froze to keep it from flying off. Its long, yellow talons wrapped around the branch, balancing a large body made to soar instead of sit. When the bird grew comfortable with this interloper and twisted its head forward again, I used that opportunity to back up quietly and enter the house to grab my camera. Realizing I was neither food nor enemy, it continued examining me as closely as I examined it and let me take half a dozen quick shots before it flew off in search of dinner.

Oftentimes we don’t have to travel someplace grand or distant to encounter the mysterious and unexpected. My garden constantly puzzles me. I admit, I am not a disciplined gardener. In fact, this year aside from folding in some nutrients before shoving a few tomato plants in the ground, I did practically nothing. With preparations for France consuming my spring, I didn’t have much time to prune, mulch, plant, rake, weed or do anything to prepare it to thrive and expand this season. Yet it continued to grow without me. However, without my management, it certainly showed that it had developed a mind of its own.

My “dwarf” hydrangea is now more than twice as big as I had ever expected it to be. Because the tag on the small bush had definitely said “dwarf,” I placed it near the front edge of my bed so that now it smothers all other worthwhile flora around it. This week, however, its large floral heads of the bush are turning from a mossy chartreuse to a ripe cranberry color, and soon the leaves will follow. It embraces the coming cold. Somewhere around here I had planted a striking black salvia. I don’t recall seeing it this summer. Did I accidentally pull it as a weed last fall because the marker had disappeared, or was it overtaken by my hydrangea? And what is the name of that feathery plant that a neighbor had given me from his garden? I had planted it so that its delicate white flowers could add interest woven among blank spots in my boxwood bed. They are now almost as tall as my butterfly bush and will probably have to be ripped out next year so that they don’t interfere with the symmetry of the space they were intended to simply accent.

I lose a lot of plants because I’m so pathetic at adequately identifying them by any permanent mechanism. I buy a gross of markers, with all the best intentions to organize my garden as I plant, but it seems to fall by the wayside every year. Are those serrated, fuzzy leaves over there some kind of hellabore, a new kind of dandelion, or something I don’t remember buying? But the markers can also be totally useless. This year my phlox migrated on their own. None exist where I originally had planted them, but one is growing up through the azalea bush. One phlox plant has made a home where the yarrow, which has surrendered this year to the overgrown Russian sage, was supposed to grow. Another phlox slid down the rock stairs into the daisy patch. But that’s ok because for some reason the daisies didn’t bloom this year. Each summer it’s a mystery what will come up where.

I love my garden and I love the surprises and bounty it can give me. I did nothing to the tomatoes this year but plant them and leave the country. Yet here in the middle of October the ripe, red fruit keeps coming. One year I had some extra gladioli bulbs left. I stuck them against the fence because it was the only place where the ground had not yet frozen since, as usual, I was behind schedule. I thought they were annuals, but their peach loveliness waves in the summer breezes every year. Last year a neighbor gave me a dozen clumps of sweet woodruff to try as ground cover. Those few clumps are now spreading and flourishing with more vigor than I have a right to expect. A columbine I didn’t plant sprang up in the overgrowth surrounding our trash cans in the alley.

Change comes to my garden whether I want it or not. But I can also direct its renovation if I just start early enough in the season. The world recognizes my efforts from time to time. As I’m bent over toiling at the weeds, neighbors and strangers stop to smell the sweet scent of my viburnum in the spring or to ask the name of the giant white anemones standing guard at the front of my house. My garden brightens the days of those passing through. And it seems to meet with the approval of peregrine falcons taking a rest before continuing their hunt.

As I rake, and weed, and try to plant barely one step ahead of the winter chill, I also have to admit that I’m in the autumn of my years and need some tending. I feel the season changing down to my roots. But I embrace the energy of autumn. Until the first snows come, autumn is marked by a riot of color and crisp air. Instead of fading into that season of death, it’s time to prune, and rake, and fertilize, and plant in my own life. I want to anticipate spring’s energy ahead rather than the cold of winter creeping up behind me. Maybe I’ll have another hawk in my future. I’m sure my life will present more than enough dandelions and invasive wild violets that resist extraction, rooting deep in my habits and requiring special tools to rip them from where they’ve anchored. If I work hard enough my own garden, though, maybe I’ll also be rewarded with the mystery of flowers I don’t remember planting poking their heads above the weeds.