Autumn has its seeds

I woke up this morning with a vague notion of regret, recognizing that I am limited in my choices, annoyed that the carpenter bees are still embedded in the eaves of my house, and remembering what it was like to be 23 years old.

Then I realized, as I stretched in bed, that I was shivering. For the first time in four months, the room was cold. Since May, the bedroom window has been open, allowing spring and summer air to ooze through the screen like ghosts carrying with them the scent of spring flowers, the symphony of night crickets, and the low hum of air-conditioning units from the neighbors' homes.

But this morning, through the invisible network of a Canadian air mass, word was spreading, perhaps, to bears and badgers and to a 56-year-old man under the covers in his New Jersey home that autumn was once again upon us.

We build a life, gather books and furniture, arrange our homes in neat little rows, surround them with carpets of grass. If we live in the cities, we build shelves, covet the windows and the view, manage to use every inch of space in our apartments and relish the luck if a room contains direct sunlight during part of the day.

And yet, no matter how careful we are to buy the right couch, or maintain the furnace, no matter how much we try to keep order in our homes, there is the slow and persistent power of ruin that pervades all we do.

If I do not vacuum the floors and wipe the tables and shelves in the house at least once a week, there will be a quick accumulation of dust that will coat the books, the carpets, the lampshades and the house will quickly look like a portion of a ghost town.

If I don't wash the bathtub and dump green liquid into the drain, within a few weeks, the tub will clog and look like a mud hole.

I sometimes dare myself not to shave for two days, perhaps even the third day. I look in the mirror and see a man slowly turning into an old man. Everything, it seems, needs to be protected against the inevitability of impermanence and disintegration.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I woke up this morning feeling cold, recognizing that September means a shift in seasons, and that everything turns into dust, and I was depressed.

Nothing on this earth will retain its original shape. Everything is made of atoms and molecules, and depending on how closely packed these atoms and molecules are will determine how long they will endure.

A rock in the back yard will last longer than my autographed copy of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. When we die, we will quickly deteriorate because we are so loosely held together. Our bones are strung with thin ligaments and muscles. Our hearts are thin little sacs that will dissolve like a paper bag in the rain. Our eyes are soft little orbs that will dry out like prunes.

I do not want to die. I do not want to dry up like a mummy and disintegrate into dust. I don't want my bones to become brittle and melt into the ground and disappear.

I want to unfurl like a new rose and exude the perfume of my soul and attract women, and ride horses in Texas. I'd like to read The Great Gatsby again for the first time, stand next to Roe and watch our children being born all over again.

I believe, sometimes, that evidence of eternity is hidden in the past. We are given examples of joy, memories that heal our wounds and soothe us with laughter or nostalgia, knowing that what was once grand in our lives contains little seeds of hope that we can have those days again, or that at least those days once existed.

As I dressed this morning, I stepped up to the open window and inhaled the autumn air. Like great bellows, our lungs pull in the oxygen that, in part, sustains our bodies. I closed my eyes, considered gratitude for another morning, for another autumn season, and then I walked downstairs and opened the front door to hunt for the morning newspaper.

As I stepped out of the house, I saw a squirrel's tail sticking up out of the pumpkin I bought at the farmer's market and placed on the stoop the week before.

The squirrel had bored a hole into the pumpkin and was, head first, mining the seeds imbedded in the pumpkin's belly. When the squirrel heard me, its tail disappeared inside the pumpkin. I stood in silence, and then slowly the squirrel poked its head out of the pumpkin hole. It looked at me. I looked at it. The squirrel's face was wet from pumpkin hole. It wrinkled its nose, chewed a bit on a pumpkinseed, and then wiggled out and sat on the top of the Halloween gourd.

I wrinkled my nose. The squirrel shook its tail a few times in anger or distress, then it leaped onto the ground and disappeared up into the maple tree.

I bent over the pumpkin and reached into the hole the squirrel created and scooped out eight flat pumpkinseeds. I looked at the white seeds on my palm, each containing biological threads that can weave into pumpkins. Each seed was the possibility of a new universe, the replication of autumn and squirrels and old men bending down in the morning and considering the seeds like magic beans.