Memoir Monday--September Songs

I sat out on my patio and breathed in the air, still a bit more humid than the usual high desert 5-10%  but pleasant. This thought came then to me: "This is a quintessential early September day." The sky was the perfect blue--soft turquoise along the horizons  shading to a deep true sapphire overhead. White decorated it for contrast--everything from fragile lacy veils and feathers to wanna-be thunderheads that could not quite pull it off. Exactly the setting that makes September my favorite month in the high desert, my heart's home. While I might prefer to be in Arizona, today Alamogordo can stand in well enough.

They say you can't go home again and I know that is true. You can no more return to beloved places you remember than put your hand into the same bit of water in a rushing stream, whether a second or a decade has passed. That being said, I am not sure where "home" is right now; more a place in memory and likely more rosy than the reality was because nostalgia puts seamless and splendid retouching to those mental pictures. In time perhaps I will find a new one for the last days, weeks, months or years of my life but I also feel there is no rush.

Patience has never been my strong suit but encroaching age forces one to slow a bit, to take time to smell the roses while catching one's breath from some mad dash or strenuous chore. And I find I am thankful for that.  Somehow the driving force that for most of my life was a self-applied cattle prod  has weakened greatly so that I can now sit and veg with little feeling of guilt or remorse. I can take time to go back and revisit special memories and sift away the less happy ones so they blow off like chaff and fade to almost nothing. Truly I have been blessed with some very wonderful experiences in my life, lots of work and some harsh and hurtful things of course, but far overbalanced by the unique and amazing special times.

Today would have been my 47th anniversary. A couple of hours ago on September 3, 1971, I stood in the opening between the living room and a small den in my father-in-law's home and vowed to love, honor and cherish a man and his two kids who were still at home. I believe I kept that vow as well as anyone could. Rev John Y Allen, a local Methodist minister in Bisbee, presided. Before he conducted the ceremony, he took the two children aside and asked them if they were willing to accept me as the new mother-figure in their lives. They said they would. Had they not agreed I do not think he would have performed the marriage. I honor his memory for that significant gesture.

That house, now in a sad state of disrepair, is a current problem to me but in time the issues will be resolved. Just a reminder than one cannot go back. From that day I received thirty two years of good times and really very few bad ones. I grew and changed and learned so much. I have some very-much-loved grandchildren who are mine by heart if not by blood.  My second hand daughter is especially dear, from that day forward. She jokes in a most loving way about how lucky she was with her "wicked step mother." Well, I was lucky with her also. She has become a fine woman and raised three kids of her own, mostly as a single parent.

A late summer rainbow in Bisbee

Sept clouds in Camp Verde

Many other September memories cross my thoughts today, some that I will share as the month progresses. Returning to school--it always started after Labor Day back then; looking forward to fall which has always been my favorite season with trips and activities peculiar to this month and some to October, meeting and then sharing times with the first adult love of my life, finally heading off to college as I mentioned in my last post, and may other special highlights. Yes, September sings me many songs now as I look back across the years and am comforted by a day such as today. A gem set  between the hot and sometimes stormy days of summer and the chilling, darker times as winter  approaches, September is a truly magical and precious time.

Me, ready to start 7th grade

Jennifer-1st grade