For everything there is a season...

Image by South Dakota FFA

I posted this two years ago. It's one of my favorite posts and my happening upon some purple mums today brought it to mind... 

I must have had a very good summer because I've never mourned a summer's passing as much as I have this one. Over the last couple of years I've noticed I've grown more sensitive to the change of seasons and there's something pleasing about that. Perhaps I'm more attuned to nature and the world around me. Perhaps I'm slowing down enough to notice what I've passed by and rushed through for too many years. Perhaps I'm just getting older and the passing seasons are more telling than in my youth.

Some warm days are still in store for New England before the trees are fully dressed in their fall finery but cool nights are already upon us and just today I rode an elevator with a man taking a purple chrysanthemum to his mother. Mums are a sure sign of autumn.

I exited the elevator on the fifth floor to visit an older couple whose accumulated seasons are many more than mine. In fact, they were married before I was born. As I calculate it, they've passed through nearly 250 seasons as husband and wife: 62 winters, 62 springs, 62 summers and 62 falls...

Now has come a season for her to care for him in new ways, as old ways slowly slip away. He has become something of a prisoner in his own body and she has become his cell mate. No crime, no wrong doing here: they are but living out the binding sentence they spoke to each other, the words that yoked them as one: for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part...

You would hope and wouldn't you pray that their 62 years of faithful love might end with a glorious spring of warmth and rosebuds and lengthening days... but their days dwindle down in an autumn of bright afternoons, chilled by hints of falling leaves and winter...

Still a summer warmth burned in her eyes as she looked at him and I saw in her gaze the strength of all they have shared and the faith that binds them together... When I asked him if she were a good nurse, his whole face answered before his lips said yes...

For these two this is a good season, a hard season, yet another season of love...

I must have had a very good summer because I've never mourned a summer's passing as much as I have this one. Perhaps I'm slowing down enough to notice what I've passed by and rushed through for too many years. Perhaps I'm just getting older and the passing seasons are more telling than in my youth. And there's something pleasing about that...

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