Several years ago my brother in Minnesota sent me a hibiscus plant.  It bloomed several times a year and I adored it.  He told me that if I'd found a place where it would bloom, to keep it there as it might never bloom anywhere else.  He said hibiscus were fussy.  (Incidentally, I always thought women were the flower people, but after writing Where Lilacs Still Bloom (2012) I learned how much the male psyche enjoys gardening, my brother included).

 

Eventually the hibiscus plant became too big to keep on the table in front of the window so we transplanted it. Well, it never did bloom again despite my efforts to find new spots  for it, speaking encouraging words at it, fertilizing it etc., etc., etc..

 

Then we moved.

 

I tried a number of possible sites for it in our new home and about two months ago settled on a spot in the sun room.  Well, last week it bloomed!  There were 8 buds on it; two dropped off but one gave us this glorious trumpet of pink.  It lasted only a day and a half and then imploded onto itself.  But I know we've found its home and it looks like another is making a stand for beauty.  Like the day I knew we were home when PB the cat rested on Bo's back, with the blooming of this hibiscus, I can actually say "this is home" and the ranch is a place of the past.  A good place, a quiet place, but past. I think this understanding is a part of the journey of change and I hope this month you'll allow yourself to be nurtured as you discover your own hibiscus moments.  Savor them.  They only last a short time.

 

 

 

October is the yellow-brown time of year in Oregon.  Trees begin to change their colors, the buck brush and rabbit brush bloom with tiny yellow blossoms and even the grasses begin to shed their green and take on a haze of maize.  Black cows look like rounded river rocks chewing their cuds lying in the golden wheat stubble.

 

 

 

In my earlier life, October was a sad time.  It meant the end of warm summer days and the beginning of shoveling snow, scraping windshields and learning how to put on tire chains. I never took the time to really appreciate the transitions (nor did I discover all the joy of winter months!). 

 

Then I met Jerry who always said that his calendar began in the fall when dove season opened.  This season was followed by deer season, chukar season, pheasant hunting, doe season, elk season, the steelhead run and though he might have hunted geese before our marriage, he never did afterwards as the thought of those magnificent Canada geese missing a partner for life by his hands was more than I could bare.  His fall morphed into late January when the last of the "seasons" ended.

 

 

We spent this past week at the ranch.  It was deer season and the steelhead were running.  He filled his tag and caught two big fish, one he estimated weighed 18 pounds, the size of Caesar, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  He released the fish as they were not fin-clipped meaning they were native fish and those must be set free as North westerners are committed to rebuilding the native runs on wild and scenic rivers.  The Indian treaties of 1855 used the fish runs as a statement of how long the treaties would be in effect..for as long as the fish shall run. While we watched, deer made their way down braids of paths around the rimrocks to the sub-irrigated alfalfa field where streaks of green like a painter cleaning her brush marked the otherwise yellow field.  We watched with binoculars amazed at how deer appear like stars in the twilight sky as though from nowhere. 

 

 

 

What I'd forgotten about was the great quiet of this season.  Many song birds no longer flitter in the pear or spruce tree having fled south. Without cattle or mules to clank against the water troughs the yellow weeds have re-discovered the corrals and with no cows to keep them out, they're making silent headway in the fertile corral soil.  Coyotes howl at night -- and once during the day they yipped their song -- but mostly, with the wind still, we could hear the river rippling over gravel bars newly deposited during the high water.

 

There was time to read. It struck me that without a radio, internet or television, it was much like it had been when we first moved there.  I read for pleasure, something I often don't give myself permission to do which is sad, really.  I write hoping others will find pleasure in my work so why don't I read other writers for pleasure?  Mostly because I'm reading research pieces to support my historical novels.

 

 

But this time, I read for fun.  Mysteries by Kathleen Ernst (see Word Whisperings); an English novel set in the 15th century; a legal thriller; a bestseller by an author coming to the Nature of Words www.thenatureofwords.org  here in Bend in November; a light an happy romance.  Jerry and I read together a book about spiritual strengths and even that was pleasant! And yes, I did work on my next novel by reading a biography of Dorothea Dix...until Caesar used it for a pillow.  But most of all I took pleasure in reading not just to instruct or to better understand what is happening in the world around me; I read for joy and didn't limit it to chapters I rewarded myself with for having worked on my own novel!  In the process I found a new dimension to Kafka's charge that a "book should be an axe to the frozen sea within us."  Entertaining reading can melt that frozen sea, too, especially when surrounded by quiet fall moments. I hope you'll look for books that melt your yellow season and remind you of the joy that comes from a good read and from savoring silence.  Have a great October!

 

 

 

Warmly,