by Kate Michaelson

 

Fall is our favorite, my mom and I, both of us born into it. We celebrate her 84th birthday early this year at a winery my sister found at the center of the scattershot places we call home. Not a place we’ve been before, but a space that smells of fresh bread and fermentation and is big enough to hold the horde of us who drove hundreds of miles on a late October afternoon—the kind that still brings enough hours of warm, low-angled sun to turn the last leaves to gems. 

My siblings and I cram these celebrations in while we have her, time growing short as the days. The five of us scramble to plan for what can’t be foreseen. Will there be a Thanksgiving this year? Who’ll host? Who’ll do Christmas now that she can’t bring us together over that scratched-up table where we added leaves as the generations branched? For so long we believed, as children do, that these delights just happened like a rising sun and always would.

Today, we gather around her, angling our chairs so she needn’t turn, scooching her right up to the table’s edge so she needn’t reach. Ignoring old wounds, we bring gifts of fancy candy and more scented candles than she’ll ever have a chance to burn. We fill in missing words, race to pick up what she drops. We would do anything to spoil her now, this once-too-young mother who lashed out, this woman we once sassed and shamed, who served it right back, topped with all the bitterness she knew of life.

Today, we focus only on the things she likes—late snapdragons in heady pinks and yellows. Songbirds, fat with berries, passing south. The drunken fire of fall when what still lives turns desperately bright. 

We marvel at how on certain cloudless, windy days—maybe once or twice a year—leaves rain like heaven’s scraps against a blinding blue, like something necessary to ward off bare branches and the coming dark. In this spectacle of color, we let ourselves forget, for the moment, just how much it hurts to see things go. 

 

Kate Michaelson is the IPPY-Award-winning author of the mystery Hidden Rooms. Her short prose and poems have appeared in River Teeth, The Laurel Review, and Free Verse. She lives with her husband in Ohio. You can connect with her on Instagram at @katemichaelsonwriter or at katemichaelsonwriter.com.