The Seasonal Pause

Tonight's the night! 

Put on the socks, wrap a quilt around my head and shoulders, wrap my hands around a hot cuppa (for me, coffee) and sit on the porch.

It rained today, so the light is shimmering.

The lowering temperature has the air smelling so clean.

The clean smell of falling leaves and fading greens; of pollen-heavy goldenrod and foxtails, and all those plants. 

of long darkened evenings and darkening days and long nights ahead when warmth is the best aroma and even in our electric or gas or other technology age, the scent of warmth calls to mind woodfires and cooked food and family.

Too soon the coming cold will be tiresome. The wet, dark evening will be an annoyance.

We'll be over it.

the plants will die, the greens will brown, and the trees will be bare.

But for now, for tonight, we can enjoy the changes in the air. We can cherish the passing of the seasons. We can await the coming hours of darkness knowing that, one way or another, the light will come again.

Eventually.

And the cuppa warms the hands, the nose, and the heart as surely as the socks and quilts warm the body

Amidst the Mists, pt 2 of Part 3

For a moment, or so it seemed, he was back in the fog, in the thick almost substantial parts of it, but sounds drew him back to the bed.

Sounds of footsteps. 

Sounds of voices. 

Three people, out in the hall. Tall, male. Working men, wearing boots, that they were taking off, from the sounds. Weren't they supposed to do that out on the porch? 

A slammed door on a rush of wind and rain hitting the inside floor answered that. Rain coming from that direction, the porch was probably inundated. 

Only one of the men came to the door(?) of the room. "Any change?" he asked, but not like he expected an answer. 

The hand woman said yes and the doctor woman said no. 

The doctor elaborated that there had been no physical change worth mentioning. Irregular breathing irregularities, but that was to be expected. No signs of returning consciousness. 

The other woman said, in a warm positive tone, that she felt a difference.  That he WAS coming back from wherever he'd gone. She KNEW, she just knew.

There was no doubt in her voice or in her words. Her surety warmed him from the inside as her hands had his outside, and he knew he could sleep, and rest, as he knew he needed to.