The Ghosts of Autumn Past

I've had past Octobers on the brain, and I'm not sure exactly why.  When the local NPR station did it's fundraising at the beginning of the month, I grabbed 2 CDs, which happened to be CDs from Octobers past:  U2's War, which I bought on vinyl in the fall of 1983, and Reggatta de Blanc by the Police, which I bought on vinyl in the fall of 1984.  Listening to that music slammed me right back to those time periods.  While I loved that music, and I loved aspects of those autumns, they were stressful:  first semester in college in 1983, during a time of increased bombings and increased tension with the USSR, and in 1984, my boyfriend (who would become my spouse much later) had to return to Memphis, and we carried on our relationship from a distance.

I've been sorting through boxes of housing stuff; our buyer asked for information/receipts concerning our Hurricane Irma damage and repairs, which meant digging through files and reliving it all a bit again.  That was a September storm, but the repairs dragged through October.  We didn't have our first post-Irma trash collection until October, for example.  That was a subdued season for decorating.  I remember seeing fluttering in the trash pile and thinking of the ghosts.

Thinking about Hurricane Irma took me back to Hurricane Wilma, an October storm that came before we had recovered from Hurricane Katrina, which took out a huge tree, a shed, an above ground pool, and any sense of safety I once had.  That was back when we lived 3 miles inland, and although those storms were a category 1, they did so much damage.  That's when I first started thinking, if a category 1 storm can do all of this, what would we suffer under something stronger?

I still wonder that.  So maybe it's no wonder that although autumn is still my favorite season, I still get anxiety flares, in part because something reminds me of past traumas.

But it's also the time of year when I remember past autumns with fondness, along with some yearning.  I've spent the week-end thinking that if it was a year ago, I'd be enjoying crisp air, apple orchards, and a surprise pumpkin patch.

Yesterday I tried to cheer myself up by going to the pumpkin patch of a church that's near my new condo that we're renting.  I enjoyed walking around the grounds, choosing some smaller pumpkins and gourds, and then I enjoyed arranging them yesterday.  I bought them for something I'm going to do with the altarscape that I'll be making at church today.  More details about that to come, but in the meantime, here's this year's haul from the church pumpkin patch: